


spes semper mihi adest

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Soldiers, F/M, Families of Choice, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Not As Dark As All These Tags Suggest, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: She’s just wondering where best to look for Cassian, and how long to spend searching for him before she should assume he’s dead, when there’s an enormous commotion and a large number of stormtroopers hurtle past. A klaxon’s going mad, and Jyn can hear modulated orders being shouted. Something about a Wookiee, though what a Wookiee’s doing out here, off Kashyyk, Jyn doesn’t know. She’s only met one. He trounced her at dejarik and she slept with his captain.Can’t be the same one, surely.***Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, and the Galactic Civil War.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic ate my brain. I wrote the whole thing in ten demented days after seeing Rogue One, and still have not caught my breath. I owe the fact that it makes sense and is correctly spelled to Celeste (who also does an excellent line in catching canon errors) and Radi (who also does an excellent line in hilariously frustrated comments along the lines of WHY AREN'T THEY FUCKING YET, MAY). They beta'd this in record time and I am grateful.
> 
> I would also like to give credit to two people who came up with a couple of pieces of headcanon I have referenced here. Anghraine said she thought of Cassian as Alderaanian, and I really like the extra pain and angst that brings to this entire enterprise, so I rolled with it (to a certain extent). Notbecauseofvictories said she thought of Jyn and Cassian as being significantly older than their canon ages, and I borrowed that, too, because it made me think of Jyn Erso clashing with Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, all in their early twenties and full of bravado. And honestly, that thought is where about half of the second chapter came from.
> 
> I should make clear that I am not very good with the EU. I did check how to spell names (not like 'Leanna Hallick', as it turns out), but not much more than that. On a spelling/grammar-related note, I should also make clear that I welcome corrections on the bits of Spanish I have used here and there. My Spanish is okay, but things like the reflexive were never my strong point.

_Et res non semper,_ **_spes mihi semper adest_ ** _._

_My hopes are not always realised,_ **_but I always hope_ ** _._

_Ovid, Heroides, XVIII._

 

 

Jyn never works out why they don't just kill her and Cassian and have done with it. It's what Jyn would have done in their shoes. It's certainly what Cassian would have done. But instead they are dragged out of the lift they were found in, separated, and shoved in a brig. Cassian was bleeding everywhere; Jyn tried to fight back, but only landed a few punches and swipes before her head was knocked firmly against a wall.

 

Jyn has no idea where Cassian is, or why she can't make herself believe he's dead. He probably is; he was worse hurt than she was, and if he has been neglected as thoroughly as she has he will have died in hours. Jyn has been largely ignored, fed occasionally, searched but never given a prisoner number or a set of overalls. Nobody speaks to her or even looks at her: it's as if her capture was an afterthought, or an accident, with too much else going on to attend to dealing with her properly.

 

Jyn lets it happen. She's been a prisoner before; she keeps her head down and chooses one of her aliases to give them as a name, should they ask. It's lucky she doesn't look much like her father, except for the eyes.

 

The only conversation she has in the entire time she's there, she doesn't remember. She's sick, burning with a slow fever, and the terror of Darth Vader's presence makes her scrabble backwards into the hard plastic surface of the wall, baring her teeth.

 

"The kyber crystal," he says, holding the point of his lightsaber to her throat. Jyn's hands form claws. "The one around your neck. Where did you get it?"

 

"My mother gave it to me," Jyn says through gritted teeth. She's clammy and shaking and she doesn't want to die or to answer him, but she has no choice in either of those things. Unbidden, the memory of her mother clasping the cord around her neck and whispering to her, _trust in the Force_ , soft and full of conviction with her wide eyes and trembling hands, floats to the front of her mind.

 

"Your mother believed in the Force," Vader says. Her skin is burning and she can't press herself back into the wall any further. "Though she was not a Jedi."

 

"Yes," Jyn says. She's sick enough not to question how he knows this, and too sick not to keep talking. Her nails are biting fruitlessly into her palms. "It didn't do her much good. They killed her anyway."

 

Vader stares at her, and Jyn wonders if he's really looking at her. There's less life behind that helmet than there was behind K2's optical sensors.

 

Then he leaves. After that there is a long period of delirium, in which Jyn dreams far stranger things than Darth Vader asking her about her mother, and then there are torture droids. But Jyn is fed, and given enough bacta to keep her alive.

 

Jyn does not die.

 

***

 

It's difficult to tell night and day somewhere where the light never really changes, and Jyn has no way of keeping time. She sleeps when she's tired, she eats when she gets food, she waits, and she waits, and she waits, and while she's waiting she thinks about how these cells are designed, and what she can do to get out of them. They're not designed to hold prisoners indefinitely; there are several flaws. You’d never notice them if you weren’t stuck there for a long time, if you weren’t intimately familiar with Imperial methods of imprisonment, or if you were being tortured more thoroughly than Jyn has been.

 

She’s just wondering where best to look for Cassian, and how long to spend searching for him before she should assume he’s dead, when there’s an enormous commotion and a large number of stormtroopers hurtle past. A klaxon’s going mad, and Jyn can hear modulated orders being shouted. Something about a Wookiee, though what a Wookiee’s doing out here, off Kashyyk, Jyn doesn’t know. She’s only met one. He trounced her at dejarik and she slept with his captain.

 

Can’t be the same one, surely.

 

Jyn’s thinking this as she picks at one of the flaws she found inherent to the cell with one of the flaws inherent to her captivity. She may be so lonely she itches, after so long without sentient company, but the fact that no-one has really seen or spoken to her for days has made it comparatively easy for her to make and hide a nice sharp probe. Using the probe, she has prised a small but important panel off the wall; now she can work on the circuits beneath.

 

Her cell door whooshes open, and Jyn slips out. The corridor’s so quiet it echoes and at the guards’ desk at the end of the corridor someone has foolishly dropped a nightstick. She’d prefer a blaster, but she’ll take what she can get.

 

Jyn walks quickly and quietly down to the end of the passage, scoops up the nightstick and gives the console a cursory glance. There’s a map of the ship she’s on, lit up with madly flashing lights as half the ship has an absolute fit over whatever sent the guards running off in the opposite direction. The map looks to her like a slightly odd star destroyer, and at the end of the day, those are all built on the same symmetrical pattern. Jyn knows a little from her own sources, and a little more from Kaytoo and a little from Cassian and Bodhi – enough to be able to guess where she is relative to important places. Like, for example, the dock where any covetable small spacecraft will be.

 

But where to look for Cassian?

 

Jyn grasps her necklace and stares at the map. She’s biting her lip bloody and she knows she has no time to stick around in the open like this.

 

 _I am one with the Force, the Force is with me_ , runs through her head, and for a moment Jyn thinks she’s saying it aloud – and then she realises that she is, muttering under her breath as Chirrut used to do, visibly driving Cassian mad. She stops herself.

 

 _Little sister_ , a laughing voice whispers.

 

Jyn damn nearly drops her nightstick.

 

But her feet are already turning to a path that seems warmer and clearer than the rest, and she pushes any concerns about hallucinations out of her head, and starts to run.

 

 

On the way Jyn surprises a stormtrooper and a young officer who is roughly as green as grass. Jyn can tell the officer’s inexperience by the way she tries to help the stormtrooper take Jyn down and only gets in his way; Jyn tangles them up in each other and cracks them both efficiently over the head. Jyn pulls the stormtrooper’s white plasteel armour over her clothes, stuffs his black underclothes and weapons into the bag the officer was carrying, and deprives both of their passes and their blasters.

 

 

Cassian is half-awake. His clothes are bloody and partly shredded, and beneath them and the bacta Jyn can see scars that are healing and the distinctive marks of a torture droid, which are not. He looks thin and sunken and sick and he needs a shave. He also looks quite surprised to see Jyn; for a moment she isn’t even sure he recognises her.

 

“Hello, Cassian,” Jyn says. Her tongue is crowded with words that won’t come out. She swallows them down. “Have a blaster.”

 

She offers him the lighter of the blasters she stole, and he takes it with a familiar, easy grip that reassures Jyn that he’s still in there.

 

 “If this is a dream,” Cassian announces, swinging his legs off his bunk and staggering towards Jyn, “it is a _beautiful_ dream.”

 

***

 

Stealing the shuttle Jyn finds goes just fine, not least because someone is still raising hell very competently on the other side of the Death Star. Jyn only discovered their exact location halfway through her escape attempt, and she’s trying desperately not to think about it, because she needs to fly her stolen ship instead. She can’t fly if she collapses or vomits. But her clammy hands are trembling, and her breath is coming short; it’s possible that some of that is because her latest jail was the superweapon that burned Rogue One to vapour and – one way or another – took all three of her parents’ lives.

 

Cassian would probably argue that she can’t fly anyway. Her piloting very quickly convinces him that this is _not_ a dream, beautiful or otherwise.

 

“Force preserve me,” he moans, clinging to the console and following the command sequence to go to hyperspace. “Never do that again.”

 

“You’ll just have to make sure you’re in good enough shape to fly, then,” Jyn says.

 

As soon as the shuttle punches into hyperspace, and the sky stretches out in flashing lines of blue almost too bright to look at, Cassian passes out in his seat.

 

***

 

Jyn doesn't take them to Rebellion space, firstly because she doesn't know where to go and secondly because she is Saw Gerrera's foster daughter and she has doubts whether the Rebellion will treat two escaped prisoners kindly. Saw would certainly have been suspicious of how they had escaped captivity, and what information they might have given up. Jyn knows very little of the Rebellion, so had very little to disclose; Cassian is another matter.

 

Jyn is Saw Gerrera's foster daughter and she knows what torture does to sentients. She must assume even Cassian told the Imperials something, and that some of it was true. She must also assume that the Rebels will think that too, and that they will not be pleasant and welcoming to either her or Cassian. She doesn't want to see him get hurt, finds herself snarling at the thought of it - and more than that, she doesn't want him to experience betrayal from the Rebel Alliance. He has spilled more blood for them than anyone she knows; some of it was even his own. And Cassian would pretend to understand when they came for him with a blaster, but it would break him beyond repair.

 

Jyn isn’t without resources. Lianna Hallik went to jail, but Lianna Hallik wasn't her only identity, and in the fourteen years she spent as a free agent, she made a few contacts that are all her own. She has favours to call in, and people who might be interested in kicking work her way; some may even have contacts with the Rebellion who could subtly sound out their reception back on Yavin 4. She's sure that Cassian will only be an asset to a smuggler and a grifter, but she knows him, and he'll be drawn back to the Rebellion like a lothcat to an unguarded campfire. She may as well know if he'll be welcomed or speared before he tries to go anywhere.

 

After an hour or so of cursing, trial and error, and diligent application of the pristine spare manual tucked into the back of the pilot's seat, Jyn manages to set course for a small planet in the Ileenium system.

 

Then she drags Cassian onto the floor, rolls up the stormtrooper's underclothes as a pillow, and leaves to strip off and check herself for a tracker chip. She doesn't remember having one implanted, but it doesn't hurt much; she remembers from the last time she had one put in. Kaytoo had cut Lianna Hallik's tracker chip out with great precision, and it had hurt a hell of a lot more than the insertion.

 

Standing under the unforgiving light of the small passenger bay, Jyn can see every inch of damage that's been done to her. She shakes.

 

It's not because she's been scarred or because her fingernails will grow back unevenly, or because she came so close to death.

 

It's because she's still _alive_.

 

 

Jyn allocates herself ten minutes to hyperventilate and tremble while she parses every square centimetre of skin, looking for tell-tale bumps or cool patches or pulses where there shouldn't be pulses, and then she goes and strips Cassian so she can check him too. He doesn't wake up, and he doesn't have a tracker either. It's like the Imperials picked them up in a fit of absent-mindedness and just decided they were too insignificant to waste resources on.

 

Good, Jyn decides, and smiles painfully. She's never been one to interrupt her enemy - and yes, the Imperials are now _her_ enemy, she's done with 'I'm only doing this for my father' and 'this is revenge for my mother', she's writing her name on the Imperials' death warrant for once and for all - when he's in the middle of making a mistake.

 

 

Cassian wakes up after a few more hours. "Jyn," he croaks, and "water." There are emergency rations in the passenger bay, so Jyn brings him water, lifts him so he's propped up against her chest, and helps him drink. He's still heavy, and significantly taller than her, so it's not easy. But the way his head lolls against hers, greasy-haired and feverish, is undeniably real and undeniably worth it.

 

"We escaped," Cassian says.

 

Jyn nods, knowing he'll be able to feel her chin bob against his shoulder. "Thanks to a bunch of idiots and a Wookiee attacking the other side of the ship."

 

"Wuh?" Cassian says, through lips which are apparently thick and uncooperative with dehydration, in tones of great confusion.

 

"No," Jyn says. "I don't get it either. It happened."

 

She gives him some more water and then lays him back down.

 

"Where are we going?" Cassian asks.

 

"A planet I know," Jyn says. "In the Ileenium system. I know someone who'll buy this ship and the trooper armour I picked up. And maybe even give us a job."

 

Cassian frowns. There are new lines around his eyes and between his brows. "The Alliance."

 

"We'll try for the Alliance when you can walk without help," Jyn says. "Besides, you're the one who knows how to find them."

 

Cassian closes his eyes. "Been thinking about that."

 

"Have you," Jyn says, heart sinking.

 

Cassian doesn't say anything else. Jyn helps him into the main body of the ship, into the tiny cramped fresher, and out of his clothes and into a state of comparative cleanliness. She re-dresses him in the stormtrooper underclothes, which he hates, and stuffs a tube of edible protein in his mouth to shut his complaints up. He falls asleep on one of the lounges in the passenger bay; Jyn bundles his filthy, ragged clothes and as many of her equally disgusting outer layers as possible in the sonic shower, in the vague hope that this will work a bit like washing them with water they haven't got.

 

Then she goes and sits in the captain's chair, watching the stars melting into the streaks of hyperspace without seeing. Is this what Bodhi saw? she wonders. Is this what steadied his hands and eyes when he got behind a ship's controls? They always shook, otherwise. Or maybe it was just that she only knew him when he was taking leaps of faith, waiting for the fall.

 

Jyn picks up the manual again. Bodhi would shriek if he knew how little she knows about piloting spacecraft.

 

Its pixelated pages blur with her tears.

 

***

 

"I wanted to get to that beach," Cassian says, when he wakes and she's about to pass out; he's sitting up on his makeshift bed, staring at his mangled hands.

 

"What?" Jyn doesn't know how long she's been awake, but her eyelids are heavy, her eye sockets aching, and she doesn't think it's just from holding back tears. Bodhi would have yelled that this wasn't the time to cry, it was the time to learn how to fly this stupid thing before she got everyone killed, so she hadn't been crying.

 

She rubs her eyes and waits for Cassian to answer.

 

He looks at her when he does. His eyes are very liquid, the way deep black tar pits are; boiling, but silently, their deadly undercurrents invisible. "The beaches at Scarif. They were beautiful."

 

"Yeah," Jyn says, because he's not wrong.

 

"I thought, if I had to die anywhere, it would be good to die there. Just sit quietly on the beach with you. Let it happen."

 

"But we didn't die," Jyn says, sitting down hard on the other bank of seats. They are very square but soft enough, and Jyn aches to sleep.

 

"No," Cassian whispers.

 

There is a long pause.

 

"I should check myself for trackers," Cassian says, standing.

 

"I already did it," Jyn says, and her voice breaks on a yawn. "You're clean. We both are."

 

Cassian arches an eyebrow at her. She lies down and closes her eyes, so as not to meet his.

 

She might be imagining the soft pressure of his hand brushing her newly clean hair as she falls asleep. He doesn't say anything more.

 

***

 

Cassian helps her land the little craft - it must be a hopper, meant to go from star destroyer to star destroyer, or between planets and corvettes; it certainly doesn't take landing on rough ground well - and waits while she walks towards the farmstead she remembers. It's just on the edge of town; close enough to be part of the community, and far enough that any visitors who are criminal, peculiar, or both are easily ignored.

 

Jyn approaches warily. She does wonder if the management she knew are still in charge; it's been five years, and Amira and Matariki often sailed close to the ion storm when she knew them.

 

She gets confirmation that they are when she spots a plump, lilac Twi'lek woman feeding animals that look sort of like chicken but with sharper teeth, and when that woman stuns her with a blaster whipped from beneath her leather apron.

 

"Trudie," says Amira several minutes later, when Jyn's brain has stopped trying to buzz its way out of her nostrils. She is now lying on the dirt floor of Amira and Matariki's yard. "I'm so sorry - we weren't expecting you, and these are dark days."

 

That's how Jyn learns about the destruction of Alderaan.

 

She bursts into tears she cannot stop, great gulping sobs the likes of which she hasn't cried since she was sixteen. This is the end result of her father's decades of captivity; this is where Bodhi's daring, Chirrut's faith, Baze's trust and K-2's loyalty has brought them. This is what Cassian's friends laid down their lives to prevent.

 

It was supposed to be _worth it_ , their sacrifice on Scarif, and for one mad moment Jyn wonders if this would not have happened, had she and Cassian made it to that beach and died, their faces turned to Scarif's death glow as Saw had turned his face to Jedha's.

 

Jyn cries so hard her ribs scream and her lungs are scraped raw, and Matariki comes running to either shoot or comfort someone.

 

"What have you been doing, Trudie Callista?" Matariki demands when she has sputtered to a stop, eyes and nose streaming.

 

Jyn blows her nose on her sleeve and doesn't answer. Both women are on their knees beside her. Amira is frowning and sitting back on her heels, one hand on her blaster; Matariki peering into her face, broad lower lip caught between straight, sharp teeth.

 

"I haven't brought it here," Jyn tells them. "I checked both of us. We're clear."

 

"We'll check that, if you don't mind," Amira says.

 

Matariki raises her eyebrows, ignoring her wife. "What _have_ you brought here, Callista?"

 

"A friend," Jyn says, wondering if Cassian, too, has reams of aliases tucked into the back of his head, or if his informants never even know who he is. "And a stolen Imperial ship, which we're not being followed for, because I checked and my friend smashed the tracker beacon anyway. Oh, and some stormtrooper armour, if you're still melting it down to mend yours."

 

"I certainly am," Matariki agrees, tapping the greaves still fixed over her shins. "Decent-quality plasteel just gets more expensive. What do you want?"

 

Jyn hesitates. "A bit of time," she says eventually. "Not much. But... my friend is hurt. And we need to swap out that Imperial ship for something a bit less conspicuous. And then, well, if there's any errands you want run..."

 

Amira rubs a hand over her mouth. "I think we could come to an agreement of some sort. But not if your friend is also going to have hysterics all over my yard."

 

Jyn nearly laughs, and also nearly cries; she can't imagine Cassian in tears, but this might just do it. "I don't think that's likely."

 

Amira fixes her with a razor glare; Jyn is reminded of Baze. "What else do you want?"

 

Matariki taps her fingers on her blaster.

 

"If you know anyone at the Rebellion," Jyn says carefully, "or who might know someone with affiliations... it's possible there's a few people who'd be glad to know my friend is alive."

 

She leaves herself out of it, in the well-founded belief that not one member of the Alliance will care.

 

"You'll be lucky to get a message through before they're all dead themselves," Amira says bluntly. "Maybe your friend should stay dead."

 

"We'll see," Jyn says, and is hauled to her feet by Matariki. "I'd better go and give him the news."

 

***

 

Cassian rages more than he cries. Jyn doesn't understand the words he screams any more than she understands what drives her to take him into her arms and hold onto him tightly; all she knows is that he's hurting himself more, punching the walls of the ship, smacking the flat of his hands against the table bolted to the floor, and she has to stop him. And it helps her, too, somehow, to hold onto him like he's the last still point left in the galaxy, to curl her fingers into his shoulders and press his face into her neck. His tears are hot against her throat, and she can feel his teeth bared in a grimace of grief. He's shaking worse than he was when she broke him out of his cell, and he's holding onto her as tightly as she is to him.

 

He's still spitting out words. Jyn can't hear most of them and she only recognises the swearwords, but his tone needs no translation. Her own eyes are stinging and sore, but she cried out all her tears on Amira and Matariki's dirt floor, and she has nothing left to give. She runs her fingers through Cassian's hair and closes her aching eyes, croaking the soothing words that she dimly remembers her mother saying to her.

 

 _Little sister_ , something murmurs in the back of her mind, and it's no longer laughter, it's a gentleness and a sadness that makes Jyn angry, for she can almost hear Chirrut: _I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_. Jyn doesn't want to believe in the Force any more than Baze does.

 

Did.

 

Jyn curls up with Cassian on the floor of the shuttle and mourns with him.

 

***

 

Amira and Matariki ask even fewer questions than Jyn expected, even from a renegade Mandalorian and a master thief who used to be the most sought-after dancing girl on twenty planets. They accept 'Trudie' and 'Leon'; they pretend to believe the stories Jyn and Cassian offer them, and in return for work give food and shelter. Cassian's hands heal up while he helps Amira sift through information to find fat targets, and Jyn climbs all over the roof at Matariki's shouted orders, nailing tiles into place, hiding booby-traps under innocent solar panels. The craft Jyn and Cassian landed is quickly mended and sold, before the Empire have time to come looking for it: the longer it hangs around in one place the less safe it is. They're working on finding a ship to replace it, and in the meantime Jyn and Cassian make short trips in Amira and Matariki's hopper, carry out small errands, building up trust. No-one out here has ever seen a Mandalorian besides Matariki, so although Cassian's too pale and pointy and slight for your stereotypical Mandalorian, he passes well enough as an off-worlder half-Mandalorian cousin of hers. Jyn, meanwhile, just says she didn't like the position as ship's guard she took when she left the planet last time.

 

There's very little news. Everyone is quiet and subdued as the shockwaves of Alderaan's destruction echo through the galaxy. Half the Rebellion are probably waiting to die, if what Jyn saw of them in her brief tenure as a rebel is accurate; there's been no response to the feelers Matariki put out through her contacts, naming 'Leon Jerran' as a man the Rebellion might welcome good news of, but it's early days yet. Jyn almost doesn't want to know, is still nursing the raw patches the news of Alderaan's destruction left, is perversely determined to be blind to whatever happens next, good or bad: she wants the world to stop for a while, she wants a chance to regroup. But she knows Cassian is desperate for information. It's the sort of thing he does - picks at his own scars.

 

But even though Cassian is slowly working his way back into a network of informants that perhaps won't owe _everything_ to the Rebellion, it's Matariki who first hears of the fall of the Death Star, sitting in the little turret with a satellite and communications array, picking up messages, and runs downstairs to share the news.

 

Jyn and Cassian are gutting a sable boar between them. Cassian brought it down, a better shot with a rifle, but he is not an efficient butcher and Jyn is. They have just got all four haunches into the kitchen when Matariki bowls in, knocks four platters, the table and most of Amira's bloody kitchen knives askew, and lays a nigh-on pornographic kiss on her wife, yelling in Mando'a and Basic and Huttese and several other languages Jyn doesn't even recognise about salvation and the last chance saloon.

 

It takes several minutes for them all to understand what has happened; it takes the longest to sink in for Jyn and Cassian, who stand there frozen for several minutes.

 

The Death Star is gone forever. It's less than stardust.

 

Jyn giggles. She can't help it. She claps both hands over her mouth and looks at Cassian, who is plainly dumbfounded - and then his dropped jaw slides into the brightest smile she's ever seen, and they're both laughing aloud. Jyn only means to hug him, but he picks her up off her feet and swings her round, holding her as tightly as he did the day they learnt of Alderaan's annihilation, laughing giddily into her hair. She is trembling, starlight thrilling in her veins; she's forgotten, or maybe she's never really known, what it's like to hope. One leg of the sable boar goes flying, and Cassian and Jyn leave bloody handprints on each other's skin and clothes.

 

Amira opens four bottles of something hideously expensive they make in Corellia and pay top prices for in Coruscant, and they all get very drunk indeed. If Cassian and Jyn forget to call each other Trudie and Leon, Amira and Matariki overlook it. If Matariki and Amira start talking about battles well won and an end of the Empire, Jyn and Cassian pretend they know nothing about their true political leanings.

 

Jyn composes, and Cassian encodes, a transmission broadcast on several Rebel frequencies they probably don't even use any more.

 

 _Thank you, thank you_ , Jyn says, her words half-slurred with an almost painful joy and a lot of Amira's expensive brandy. _Thank you for making it worth it. Thank you for making their deaths mean something. Thank you for Chirrut and for Bodhi and for Baze and K2 and all the Rebels who died on Scarif. Thank you for us. Thank you. It was worth it, it was worth it. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me._

 

"Oh, no," Cassian groans, his clever fingers dancing over the keys as he encrypts the file, signs his work with an uncharacteristic flourish. "You're beginning to sound like Chirrut."

 

"There are worse people to sound like," Jyn says, sitting bolt upright on Cassian's lap, swinging her feet idly. She's humming a song Saw Gerrera's militants used to sing twenty years ago; the tune is bold and hearty, but if you sang it in a minor key, softly, the stormtroopers flinched and started firing at shadows you weren't in, too used to a young girl's voice singing their death song.

 

Cassian thumps a key to send the transmission and half-collapses back into the chair. He pulls Jyn with him, nuzzles his face into her loose brown hair, and chuckles.

 

"He did it, your father," Cassian tells her. "He really did it."

 

Jyn puts her arms around his neck. She knows it's illusory, but she hasn't felt this safe for a long time.

 

"I told you so," she says.

 

***

 

After the first few days, they sleep on pallet beds in Amira and Matariki's loft. It's comfortable enough. Before that, Cassian was sick enough to merit the guest bedroom, and Jyn found she couldn't sleep without being able to wake in the night and see Cassian, living and breathing.

 

The same is true of the ship Amira finds; the Imperial hopper pays for most of it but Jyn and Cassian will have to do a few jobs for Amira and Matariki to make up the difference. Of course, there's only one bunkroom, two rather threadbare bunks one on top of the other, but often one of them is not there when the other is trying to doze off. Cassian breaks first, pulling his sleep-sheets into the hold bay while Jyn does quality assurance and sets prices on their cargo. She has a good eye for detail, price and quality, and she haggles better than he does. Cassian drops the sleep-sheets on the floor, rolls himself up in them, and - without comment or apparent hesitation - goes to sleep.

 

After that, Jyn feels free to curl up in the co-pilot's seat and doze while Cassian is plotting a course, or forging papers, or generally working himself to the bone.

 

The ship has no name except the names they give it for their various errands, but Jyn thinks of it as Stardust, and when she says it aloud, Cassian knows what she means.

 

***

 

Their new ship is just about paid off when Matariki gives them a message from the Rebellion.

 

 _Thank you for your service_ , it says. _We honour your sacrifices and we look forward to your return to duty._

 

Then there's a large information package.

 

"What the hell is this?" Jyn demands, sifting through it.

 

"A test," Cassian says, squinting at the files with a certain light in those big dark eyes, and Jyn can practically see the Rebellion sinking its claws back into him.

 

***

 

"Time for you to move on, then," Amira says, matter-of-fact. "It's been good working with you, you're very efficient. If you get bored of the Rebellion, remember we pay better."

 

Matariki blesses them both in Mando'a and makes pancakes for breakfast on their last morning.

 

***

 

They talk over the various hints and leads they found in the information package, and order them by priority. Some are not critical; some are based on tissue-thin intelligence. There is no overlap between these two sets.

 

Jyn didn't expect even this much of a welcome; Cassian, it's plain, is grateful for the chance to earn his way back into the Rebellion, to prove the usefulness he's proved time and again. It makes Jyn's heart ache for him, the hopeful curl to his mouth, the eagerness in his voice badly hidden. She knows why the Rebellion are testing them and appreciates the logic - Saw would probably just have shot them outright, and considered it more mercy than the Empire would have offered them - but to see them holding out thin scraps of information to Cassian by way of reward makes her want to spit. They should hang on his every word and drape medals round his neck.

 

For herself, Jyn doesn't care. She bites her tongue and watches Cassian trying to make something out of nothing, flimsi copies of their information pack spread over the table in their nameless craft.

 

"That one," Jyn says, tapping a flimsi Cassian's set aside as insufficiently urgent or important. "It'll get us back into the swing of things, and if we fuck it up, not much is lost." She pulls up a star map. "Also, once we're done there, we can go to Takodana. It's close, and it's handy for these two leads you like the look of. And maybe we can get Maz Kanata to fill in some of these gaps."

 

Cassian leans back in his chair and nods slowly. "It's a plan." The blue light of the star map throws his deceptively mild features into harsh light and shadow, and his eyes are very serious; it makes Jyn feel warm, somewhere just below her breastbone.

 

"It's a better plan than my last one," Jyn says.

 

"We'll take that chance," Cassian says quietly, almost like he's reciting, almost like he has her words off by heart. "And the next, and the next, until all the chances are spent."

 

Jyn is silent for a long moment, listening to both of them breathe, and then she says: "Let's go push our luck one more time."

 

Cassian smiles.

 

***

 

On the third of their little expeditions, the Imperials nearly catch up with them. They're not looking for Jyn and Cassian, or even Tanith and Jack, the names Jyn and Cassian are using at the moment, but they are searching the covered market. The market's in a series of steep, winding, rose-red canyons, shops chipped and blasted into the stone for miles up, rickety rope ladders and bridges clinging to the rock. Jyn and Cassian meant to sidle in the back to meet their informant, but 'back' is harder to define when nothing goes in a straight line, and all of the canyons double back on themselves.

 

Jyn, glancing back and tucking dyed blonde hair under the dull green hood of her short cape, spots the stormtroopers first. The troopers have just come out of a side alley; there's no time to warn Cassian, who hasn't yet reacted to the slight change in atmosphere as the locals notice the troopers and empty space opens up around them. There's a row of stalls between them and the troopers, and Jyn herself is partially hidden by a stall selling bolts of fabric and hangings, but Cassian is taller, more obvious, and less thoroughly disguised. His hair's shorter, he's shaved, and he's wearing a long, heavy duster coat unlike anything she's seen him in before: it's a fashion twenty years older than them. But if the troopers have seen a good picture of Cassian Andor none of that will be enough, and Jyn has to assume that good profile and full-face shots of them were taken while they were in Imperial custody.

 

She steps just ahead of him, catches his eye, and pulls him down into a kiss with one hand on the back of his neck. Cassian now has his back to the troopers, head bent and shoulders hunched so he seems shorter, and is entirely concealed by a large and tasteless hanging depicting the death of Queen Somebody-or-other of Naboo, dressed in flowing blue and looking improbably saintly.

 

"Troopers," she breathes, just before her lips meet his. "We're covered."

 

He nods minutely, and one hand slips familiarly round her waist, sliding under the pack she's carrying to the small of her back. His mouth is hot and he tastes like burnt caf, which is mostly her fault, since she was the one who was forging fake IDs instead of keeping an eye on the caf pot this morning.

 

"Well spotted," he murmurs in her ear when they break apart, and his smile is just as genuine as the slight pinkness on her cheeks. The troopers are well ahead, starting a small fight by kicking an old man around; Jyn feels anger spark in her chest, but subsumes it. She can't help him by upsetting the entire mission, she tells herself.

 

It's not easy.

 

Cassian turns them casually down a side-street, and they leave the troopers behind. For a little while, he twines his fingers with hers, swinging their hands idly as they walk; she retaliates by leaning into him and pressing her cheek against his shoulder as they stop to pretend to examine a stall of misshapen fruit. He takes her cue and plays it straight, calling her 'sweetheart' so sincerely anyone who didn't know him would be fooled.

 

Jyn isn't fooled, and she's trying very hard not to laugh.

 

"Can you imagine what Kaytoo would say to this?" she breathes, standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.

 

"Nothing polite," Cassian mutters back, grinning.

 

"Are you sure we're going the right way?"

 

"Certain," Cassian says, and it's at that point that their informant decides it'll be easy to menace a pair of humans apparently paying no attention to their surroundings. Jyn sees the flash of a knife moving and concusses him with a quick swing of her nightstick, and Cassian grabs him by the scruff of his extremely dirty neck and yanks him into a nice dark alcove.

 

They get the information they need, in and out in half a day. Jyn buys a meal on the way out, sharp bitter greens doused with soothing oil and some sort of citrus, soft puffy rolls and skewers of unidentified quadruped meat rubbed in spice and interspersed with sweet dried fruits marinated in something until they hydrated, sticky and burnt-skinned. Cassian has a sweet tooth; Jyn loves spicy food. Besides, this is a great place to turn suspiciously shiny Empire credits into authentically battered chits and coins, and record-keeping's not so hot in a place like this that the Imperials will be able to trace the credits from a major Rebellion raid on a convoy three systems away. Apart from anything else, the locals are not fans of the Empire any more than the citizens of Jedha were. Jyn, living among Gerrera's fighters, had a skewed perspective, but even Bodhi - nice middle-class boy from a nice middle-class family who kept their heads down and let their son's career speak for their loyalties - had endless stories to tell of Imperial injustice, of one law for the troopers and one for the locals.

 

Jyn saw resentment on Jedha when she was a child, and she recognises it here now.

 

The last meat skewer goes to the old man the troopers put their boots into. Jyn can't help the impulse to do at least that much, and Cassian doesn't mind, since they're on their way out.

 

"Here, grandfather," Jyn says, wrapping the skewer in the greasy flat leaf it came in and laying it in the man's lap.

 

"May the Force be with you," he croaks, making what's probably supposed to be some kind of ritual gesture with hands that are crooked, their joints swollen. Maybe that explains why the stormtroopers knocked him about. He's lucky not to be in a labour camp, if he's going around saying he believes in the Force in front of stormtroopers.

 

But there's nothing behind his words, none of the playful certainty or total faith Chirrut wore like a cloak, and if this was all Jyn had ever heard of the Force, she wouldn't believe in it either. She catches Cassian's eye, but neither of them says anything until they are back onboard ship. There's a lot of hurrying going on; the sun is dipping and their obnoxious informant told them there's a curfew at sunset. Jyn and Cassian link arms and meander, like they're tourists who are sure they'll never get into trouble with local law enforcement.

 

"I don't believe in the Force," Cassian says, watching as she goes through the take-off sequence. They'll be on the other side of the continent in two hours, supposing Jyn doesn't crash the ship. It handles very differently to the shuttle, and Jyn wasn't any good with that either. She's learning, though; having just the one of them flight-capable is a liability that itches at her.

 

"I know," Jyn assures him, when he doesn't say anything more.

 

"Chirrut was a lot more convincing," Cassian says, peering out of the windscreen. "I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. All that."

 

Jyn nods and touches her kyber crystal necklace. But Chirrut's mantra sounds thin and meaningless without Chirrut to smile at it, or Baze to snort.

 

***

 

Jyn dreams a lot now. She doesn't call them nightmares because they're not always nightmares. There's one that she likes, perversely, and thinks she must have got from Cassian's description of the beach they were trying to reach when the Imperials picked them up. The two of them are sitting on the soft white sand, embracing; Cassian has his head buried in her shoulder, and his blood is spreading across her shirt. Tall palms are shaking in the wind, and the sky is very blue, and a great and terrible light is coming from the horizon. Jyn wakes knowing both of them are dead, and feeling very much at peace. The plastic ceiling of her narrow bunk always comes as a shock.

 

Other dreams are crueller.

 

She sees Kaytoo melting down for scrap, refusing to cry out; Kaytoo jerking and convulsing over a bank of controls; Kaytoo sinking into salt water that will destroy his circuits, corrode away the personality he developed. _Did you know that wasn't me?_ Jyn swims well but she can't lift so much water-sodden metal; she can't halt the machines that are taking Kaytoo apart. She treads water and beats at unresponsive control panels, her frail human hands splitting and seeping under the pressure, and she is not enough.

 

She sees Bodhi wrapped in inexorable tentacles, lying broken on the terracotta floor of Saw's headquarters, his eyes unseeing and clear fluid leaking from his ears and nose. Bodhi's ship plunging nose-first into the slick wet crags of Eadu, Bodhi felled by a bolt that shattered the shuttle windscreen and burnt the heart out of him in the pilot's seat; Bodhi shot point-blank by Imperials executing him next to Galen Erso, Bodhi shot in the back by a Rebellion intelligence agent who thought he was a weak link, Bodhi screaming into his comms unit for help that never came, Bodhi blown to dust and vapour by a grenade into the shuttle's belly. Jyn shakes him and shields him and pleads with Saw for him, and she is never heard. Saw looks through her, bolts pass through her, and Jyn doesn't see the end coming any more than Bodhi does.

 

She always sees Chirrut and Baze together. There's never more than moments between their deaths. Crushed by an AT-AT, shot down by stormtroopers, blown up by grenades, lost in the destruction of Jedha's sacred city, they are never apart. Seeing Baze's face as blaster fire halves Chirrut in front of him, hearing Chirrut shout for Baze who will never respond in life, Jyn doesn't think that is mercy. She screams for Baze to turn around, yells for Chirrut to fight it, but Baze never hears or sees her, and Chirrut looks straight at her with that mischievous, cryptic little smile on his face. _All is as the Force wills it_ , he says. _Little sister._

 

Jyn dreams of her mother, cut down by Krennic's men among green paddy fields and loose black rock, and her father, felled by strafing fire on Eadu. She dreams of Saw, steadfast and courageous among the falling stone of Jedha, and sometimes she dreams of Cassian shooting Krennic in the back, and from those dreams she wakes smiling vindictively, the tears on her face already dry.

 

Sometimes, she dreams of a woman with no face but faith, and the words: _My mother believed in the Force, but she was not a Jedi. It didn't help. They killed her anyway._

 

Sometimes it's a girl's voice, and Jyn can't imagine herself ever sounding so innocent but there's no-one else it can be. Sometimes it's a boy's, and Jyn thinks she must have made that up.

 

Jyn always wakes from those dreams more unsettled than from any of the others. She has one tonight - an extended replay of the maybe-fates of Rogue One, followed by the faceless woman who might or might not be her own mother - and when her eyes blink open the lids are stuck with tears and her face aches. Jyn washes her face, and sits quietly on her bunk listening to herself breathe and fidgeting with the kyber crystal around her neck until she feels less jittery.

 

Then she gets up and goes into the main body of the shuttle, scrubbing her hands on her sleep trousers. Cassian is sitting in the captain's seat, which is too wide for him - they're both still trying to replace the weight and muscle lost in the near-starvation of Imperial captivity and the sickness that followed - fiddling with part of the temperamental radio set-up.

 

He looks up when she appears: she made enough noise for that. "I thought you were sleeping."

 

"Yes. Badly."

 

Cassian nods, and says nothing for a bit. Jyn passes him a soldering iron, abandoned on top of the environmental controls, and points out a bit he missed. Cassian promptly burns himself.

 

"You're going to strangle yourself sleeping in that thing one day," he says.

 

It takes Jyn a moment to realise he means the necklace, which is hanging outside her shirt. "I've never taken it off," she says, and then adds: "Voluntarily."

 

Cassian nods without looking up. Jyn sits down on the arm of the co-pilot's seat and puts her feet on the arm of the pilot's seat, and stares aimlessly out into the stars. They have a plotted course set; there's no need for Cassian to be awake.

 

"I wish we knew what happened to them," Jyn says.

 

"We do," Cassian says. "They died."

 

"Everyone thought that about us and we didn't." Jyn sighs, shifts. "I dream about all the ways they could have died. Some of which are - are obviously wrong."

 

Cassian addresses the recalcitrant half a radio. "It's called survivor's guilt, Jyn."

 

"Try and tell me you don't wonder, sometimes."

 

"I don't," Cassian tells her, smoothly and sincerely and totally untruthfully. She can tell.

 

"Liar," Jyn says, without any particular heat.

 

Cassian tosses the soldering iron into a toolkit and looks at her like he's frustrated. She doesn't back down, and after a few moments his shoulders slump.

 

"I keep my ear to the ground," he concedes. He taps the radio. "I'm always listening out for them. I know there's nothing to hear."

 

Jyn catches her breath. The crystal is very cool in the palm of her hand, the cord cutting into the back of her neck as she pulls on it.

 

"Yes," she says eventually.

 

 

"Do you ever dream of a beach?" Cassian asks her some hours later, when they're in orbit above a small mid-Rim planet, waiting for clearance to land at its capital.

 

Jyn covers a yawn and nods.

 

"It's a good dream."

 

"Yes," Jyn says, and leans against the back of Cassian's chair, her hand on his shoulder.

 

His hand moves up to cover hers, and holds on. He's much warmer than kyber crystal, and in many ways, he feels a lot more real.


	2. Chapter 2

There are a lot of Alderaanian refugees in the Hosnian system. Cassian stands up a little straighter when he hears them talk, but - though Jyn can tell that he understands them, and they understand him - his accent is very different, and there's no answering recognition on their faces when he speaks. He eats their food like it's cooking from home. Jyn's enjoying the sharp cheeses, highly-spiced sausages and rich stews herself, but she has never seen Cassian relish his food like this. It seems to be genuine, too.

 

The Alderaanians like it, anyway. They don't speak Basic to him; they barely seem to remember Jyn's there. She sits back in the shadowed reaches of tent camps, washes up in tiny cramped apartments, and listens hard for anything she can pick out as useful. Only the children ever seem to notice she's there. Children always notice the odd one out: Cassian, with his straight black hair grown out again and pushed back off his face, dressed in a broad-shouldered tunic belted in dull metal at the waist, his quick, lively eyes and elegant hands talking as he speaks, fits in perfectly.

 

It's like he was born here. That strikes Jyn as a little strange - Cassian hasn't talked much about his past, but she's sure he was born on Fest. Still, she's lived on more planets than she likes to count, and she doesn't know where she was born, or where her parents were from. Who is she to look sideways at someone with more roots than they admit to?

 

Jyn picks up what she can and waits patiently until they've got everything they need. She can see Cassian checking off a list, somewhere in his mind.

 

"You like Alderaanian food?" she asks, when they're alone on the ship she still thinks of as Stardust, and she's in the pilot's chair.

 

"My parents were Alderaanian," Cassian admits. "They were Seppies. Separatists. It wasn't a popular point of view on Alderaan; they moved to Fest before I was born."

 

Jyn swallows this knowledge down. It sits like a river stone on her diaphragm, hard and smooth and tricky to get a grip on. "Did you..."

 

"... have family on Alderaan?" Cassian completes. He's still standing behind her, leaning on the chair, and she can just faintly see his reflection in the toughened glass ahead of her. He looks distant. "Nobody I know of. But a few... colleagues, yes."

 

There's a very long pause. Jyn has her hands full, but she's watching Cassian's reflection, and he knows it. He catches her eye and almost smiles at her.

 

"What about you?" he says. "Looking for any long-lost relatives?"

 

"Nobody I know of," Jyn says.

 

***

 

Cassian has bad dreams too. Sometimes he wakes Jyn. He never makes much noise, but Jyn sleeps lightly; you had to, at Wobani. She had to even as a little girl, waiting for the day when she had to pack a bag and run.

 

So Jyn sometimes wakes to the sound of Cassian hissing and shifting and breathing sharply in his sleep. He sounds pained and scared, and Jyn lies awake for too many nights, shaking off the remnants of her own dreams, listening to him and wondering what to do.

 

She closes her eyes one night, after Cassian has tried to make an Alderaanian sausage stew in the tiny galley and burnt the bottom out of one of their two pans, and grips her kyber crystal in her hand. _What do I do_ , she thinks. _How do I fix this? What do I do?_

 

For so long there have been things she can do: hopeless things, impossible things, but straightforward courses of action she can set her hands to. Working out how to help Cassian is not like that at all.

 

 _Little sister_ , she hears, in a voice full of compassion, and Jyn - finely balanced on the edge of her bunk, wrapped tightly in her sleep-sheets - flails and lands on the floor with a heavy thud.

 

She can't blame this one on hallucinating.

 

There's a sudden pause in the noise from Cassian, like he's been jolted out of whatever hellscape he's been living in his head. Jyn seizes the moment and her courage, and shins rapidly up the ladder to his bunk. It has more headroom than hers; she can sit upright and have several inches' clearance. She sits on the end with one hand on the guard rail and one hand on the nearest bit of Cassian, which is his foot. He's radiating tension.

 

"Cassian," she whispers. "Cassian. It's me. It's Jyn."

 

Cassian relaxes a little. "Why are you awake?" He sounds harsher than Jyn thinks he means to be.

 

"You had a nightmare."

 

"Sorry I woke you."

 

Jyn shifts further onto the bunk, and then crawls up to sit closer to him. He's taking up most of the space, but there's a little room for her. "I'm not sorry I woke you."

 

"It's not like I was sleeping well." Cassian shifts and turns onto his side, facing Jyn. She takes his loose warm hand in both of hers and holds it, tracing the blaster rifle callouses with her thumbs.

 

Why does this all feel so natural? Jyn wonders. She's not in love, or in any kind of relationship with, Cassian. But she would die for him and she has killed for him, and she knows down to her bones that there is nowhere she wants to be besides here right now.

 

"I don't think people like me are supposed to sleep well at night," Cassian points out, with a wry chuckle that makes affection curl warmly outwards from Jyn's heart.

 

She thinks about some of the things he's done - both the things he's told her and the things he only ever admits to himself and the people who give him orders. "Maybe not," she says, and then thinks about some of the things she's done. "I don't think people like me are supposed to sleep well, either."

 

"Well, that makes two of us," Cassian says, and yawns. He holds an arm out to her. "Kriff it. Come here."

 

Jyn slides under his sleep-sheets, lies down with her back pressed against his chest, his heartbeat slow against her spine, and his arm folded securely over her chest. She feels safe and very warm, and she has to yank the sleep-sheet down so that it doesn't smother her and stick her feet out for the sake of thermoregulation.

 

"There's no reason why either of us has to do this alone," Jyn says, and tangles her fingers with his.

 

"I hope you don't snore," Cassian says, and tucks her head under his chin.

 

***

 

There's something about Maz Kanata that always reminds Jyn of Chirrut. Chirrut was far taller and a lot less orange, and he never peered at you through spectacles that rumour suggested could see through your soul and out the other side - quite apart from anything else, Chirrut never needed to physically _look_ at someone to see straight through them - but they both had a stillness to them that Jyn has never seen in anyone else. A sense of being the pivot around which everything else turns.

 

Jyn keeps looking around for Baze and his repeater cannon. She knows from how twitchy Cassian gets around Maz - all things being relative - that Cassian feels the same. Jyn used to love Maz's cantina for the feeling of history to it, and the sense that anyone might walk up those wide stone steps, but now it just makes her sad. Bodhi will never sidle nervously in; Kaytoo will never end a fight Cassian starts here with clinically brutal cheerfulness.

 

And there are echoes about this place, too. She's not completely sure what the echoes are of, but she knows better than to ignore them, and she's been trying to work out what this place reminds her of for hours.

 

Jyn leans against the wall in a dark corner and watches while Cassian exchanges pleasantries, and possibly information, with someone who is a direct contact with the Rebellion. All their intelligence, except for that first packet which they are still working their way through, has come secondhand until now. So this is a step up.

 

Jyn drums her fingers on the table. Maybe the bacta shipment they managed to abstract and divert last week got the attention she's sort of been hoping for.

 

"Hey," says a woman she doesn't know, sliding onto the bench opposite her. She has a wide-open smile and bright hazel eyes; she's about Jyn's age, and she's dressed like a flygirl, wearing a leather jacket and her hair in a neat, practical bun. "You here alone?"

 

"No," Jyn says.

 

"Pity," the woman says equitably, and takes a gulp of her drink, which is pink and looks as if it would kick like a Corellian mule. "My name's Tillira; what's yours?"

 

"Trudie," Jyn lies.

 

"Anyone ever tell you you look like that girl on the Rebellion poster?"

 

"No," Jyn says, and gives Tillira her sweetest smile. "But I do have one of those faces."

 

"Memorable?" Tillira suggests.

 

"Bland," Jyn corrects, and adds: "You're sitting in my line of fire."

 

"Excuse me," Tillira says, more amused than afraid. "Should I go left or right?"

 

"You should change table," Jyn says.

 

Tillira shrugs. "Okay." She smiles at Jyn. "Let me know if you change your mind."

 

When Jyn leaves with Cassian, Tillira's absorbed in a sabacc game, which is definitely for the best. Jyn doesn't want to be noticed repeatedly.

 

"Get what we needed?" Jyn asks.

 

Cassian nods slowly. "Yes," he says, and - as they walk round to where they left the ship, Jyn loosening her blaster in its holster out of habit - flips Jyn a chip. It could be a credit chip; it looks just like one. Jyn stuffs it into her bra, since she's confident it isn't, and none of the pockets she's got in this outfit zip shut.

 

There's nobody waiting to ambush them at the ship, and there's no reason to stick around. They're well-rested and they both ate at the cantina, Cassian companionably sharing a platter with his new best friend while Jyn tried to guess whether the guy would end up going free, being shot by Cassian, or being belted with a nightstick by her. Still, they'll need some time to process the information passed on by Anilin Bey, and it would be better not to do that right under Maz Kanata's curious little nose, so Jyn goes through the pre-flight checks and sets a course for somewhere quiet not very far away.

 

"What do you know about Maz's cantina?" Cassian asks, sitting back in the co-pilot's chair and hacking through layers of encryption on the chip. "You're the one who suggested it, back when -"

 

"I know," Jyn says. The craft lifts from the ground. "Really, though, I don't know much. Very few people know much about Maz. She's not... she's outlived anyone who ever knew why she does things."

 

Cassian absorbs this.

 

"I find it strange," Jyn volunteers. "I like it, and it's a good place to pick up work and information, but..."

 

"It echoes," Cassian says, and Jyn blinks to hear her thoughts so neatly reflected.

 

"Yeah," she says, and leans forward to squint at an altimeter that's never been quite as cooperative as she would like, or as easy to reach. She does wish the chair was more adjustable, sometimes; she's too short for the current configuration, and Cassian's deadpan offer to get her a booster seat is getting old.

 

As she sits back up her necklace bangs against her breastbone under her coarse beige blouse, and Jyn suddenly knows where the echoes are from. _Little sister_ , says that increasingly familiar voice, and this time it's congratulatory, impressed.

 

If Chirrut's a ghost, he's not a very communicative one, Jyn thinks for the first time, and wishes that she could have some of Baze's straight talking instead.

 

Jyn visited the temple at Jedha City, long ago, as a very young girl. Saw had cut her hair off, dressed her as a middle-class Core Worlder boy, and temporarily renamed her Jem. There were plenty of stormtroopers looking for a tiny orphaned farmer's daughter in double plaits, but Jem walked hand-in-hand with Erina - one of Saw's favourite lieutenants, deadly with a blaster, worse with a vibroblade, dark-haired, Coruscant-accented, moon-faced and the right age to be Jem's mother - and they passed for a law-abiding blended family on a historical tour. Erina kept making up tall tales about her 'recent' honeymoon with Saw, and the tragic loss of her 'first husband' fighting the Separatists, chiefly to annoy Saw.

 

Erina and Saw had both been very knowledgeable about the history of Jedha, which was how Saw came to found his headquarters later, and how he had sneaked Jyn dressed as Jem into Jedha's sacred temple, ten years before it was stripped of all its crystals. Back then there were still monks besides Chirrut - Jyn doesn't even know if she saw Chirrut - and a few wary guards. They weren't officially Jedi,   they didn't officially fight, they weren't rich, and they had no political role, so they were still alive. They were also defenceless.

 

Even then Jyn remembers wondering how long that would last, but more than that, she remembers Saw walking her into the tiny sanctum sanctorum, wall-to-wall kyber crystals carved by time and the passage of waters long gone, its floor smoothly paved with polished crystal, a dip in the centre into which an elaborately carved bronze bowl was set.

 

"Your mother believed in this," Saw whispered into her ear, hands on her shoulders, "Lyra would have wanted me to show you. Close your eyes and listen for the Force."

 

Jyn closed her eyes and listened very hard, and there, yes, maybe, on the edge of her hearing...

 

"It's like the temple at Jedha," Jyn says suddenly, here and now and twenty years older than she was ever supposed to be. "It sings."

 

"You're not a Jedi," Cassian says, and then squints at Jyn. He has been patiently tolerating the occasional absent mutter of _I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_ from Jyn for months now, Jyn realises; he's entitled to be suspicious. "Are you?"

 

"All the Jedi are dead," Jyn informs him. (Cassian makes a very interesting noise that she'll interrogate some other time, when she actually cares about Jedi.) "No, I'm not. We live on the same ship and sleep in the same bunk, you'd have noticed. But I have been wearing a kyber crystal for twenty years. Maybe that means something."

 

Jyn lands the ship rather bumpily.

 

"Easy on the aft thrusters," Cassian suggests, without looking up from his decryptions. "So do you think the cantina is built out of a temple?"

 

"No," Jyn says. That's not Maz's style. If her cantina is on sacred ground it's because she made it that way. "But I'd love to know what Maz has got in her secret cellars."

 

***

 

They're on the dark side of Granicus, patiently ferreting out someone who might be able to tell them where they can find someone who knows which of several possible labour camps a particular political prisoner is being held in, when there's a very loud explosion.

 

Jyn is knocked off her feet into Cassian. Cassian hits a wall, some of which crumbles and falls on both of them. The person Jyn and Cassian had been persuading to tell them where their potential informant was utters a high-pitched squeal, and - when the dust has settled and they've dug themselves out of the wall - is gone.

 

"Bugger," Jyn says.

 

A hitherto unsuspected Imperial shuttle shoots past overhead.

 

"Fuck," Cassian says. "Time to go."

 

Towani is the biggest and most prosperous of the trading cities on Granicus, partly because it's on the dark side of the planet, where the geography renders tracking individual ships difficult and there are many small and secret places to land a little craft. You can buy anything in Towani, or anyone. The Hutts have an interest, as they do in most such places, and the nearby Imperial garrison live so well off the bribes the Grannicans give them that they don't interfere much. Jyn came here with a freighter, once, back when she was a twenty-year-old mercenary and occasional saboteur. She remembers being desperate to leave, but she also remembers that it's a very good place to buy information.

 

Cassian can't stand it either. He never seems comfortable in environments where everything is explicitly for sale, but then, Cassian's loyalty has always been given to the Rebellion: he can't be bought or sold.

 

Jyn's at more of a loss to explain her own distaste.

 

It doesn't matter, anyway. They're not sticking around here. There may or may not be a list of prisoners for sale, and that list may or may not contain the name, location and status of Sabé Theodora, but nobody will admit to its existence while Imperials are squatting all over the town.

 

Cassian takes the controls, since he's still more dexterous with the ship and their chosen landing pad is tricky. That gives Jyn time to notice a very familiar-looking, exceptionally shabby, light Corellian freighter.

 

"Huh," she says. "Han Solo's here. Unless he's lost his precious ship in another game of sabacc."

 

"Who?"

 

"Smuggler," Jyn supplies. "Very fast smuggler. He did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs once and he never shuts up about it." She cranes her neck to see the chaos on the Millennium Falcon's former landing pad. "It can't be him, though, he's being chased by Imperials, and Solo isn't political, just criminal. To get Imperial attention around here it would have to be political."

 

"Could he be useful?" Cassian sensibly elects to go in the opposite direction to the Millennium Falcon, so they can lie low for a few hours.

 

"Maybe," Jyn says, "for a price." She settles back into her seat. "But firstly, I doubt that's him. And secondly, if he's got any sense he'll be out of here."

 

***

 

Han Solo a) hasn't got any sense, b) is still captain of the Millennium Falcon, and c) is still dragging around a long-suffering Chewbacca. Jyn always liked Chewbacca. He's extremely straightforward. He's also very difficult to miss, particularly if you're ordering drinks at the bar of the same cantina as him. Jyn offers a casual greeting, has one growled back at her, and returns to Cassian, who has - since she left him unattended - acquired a female companion. Jyn doesn't mind, just so long as he doesn't bring anyone back to the ship and turf her out of her bunk, but that would be a security breach of the kind Cassian Andor never commits.

 

The female is human, young, and very pale. She has dark hair braided into a knot at the back and covered by a dark red scarf at the front; she's dressed in brown trousers and leather waistcoat over a loose pale blue shirt. The bit that concerns Jyn is that Cassian looks as if he doesn't know what to do with her.

 

Jyn sits down on Cassian's lap. "Get your own," she says, not unkindly.

 

"Rogue One," the girl says.

 

Jyn draws her blaster, but Cassian is quicker than she is, his hand wrapping around her wrist and forcing the blaster down.

 

"Act like you've just been rejected," he says softly, leaning his head against Jyn's. "Get up and go and find your friends. Our comm frequency is X-Q-9-Z-Alpha-4 right now. We should meet later, somewhere less public."

 

The girl droops like Cassian really has dismissed her, and Jyn grins for any audience they may have and slides an arm around Cassian's neck.

 

"What was that about?" she murmurs, kissing Cassian's temple as the girl walks away.

 

"Someone I thought was dead," Cassian says. He's shaking a little, and Jyn's embrace is not wholly for show. She gets off Cassian's lap to sit next to him on the torn fake leather of the padded bench, and drinks quickly. The waiter, a bored and miserable-looking Twi'lek boy who would probably benefit from an introduction to Amira, brings them their food. Jyn can tell that Cassian is having as much trouble as she is not hurrying to finish their meal, and that he is keeping one eye on the human girl in a red scarf, just as she is.

 

The girl leaves by the same door that Chewbacca does. Jyn has a funny feeling about that.

 

It's confirmed when their meeting is set up for the Millennium Falcon, somewhere well out of Towani, and when Cassian stalks up the gangway and addresses the human girl in a scathing blast of Alderaanian that causes Han Solo to pull a blaster on him.

 

"Hey," Jyn says. Her blaster has been drawn since they came within sight of the Millennium Falcon. "Where are your manners, Solo?"

 

"In the same sarlacc pit this guy left his in," Solo says.

 

"Put that stupid thing down, Han," the girl orders. "Captain Andor isn't being rude, just angry."

 

"Your Highness, there isn't an Imperial alive who doesn't know your face!" Cassian snaps. "Coming here, and staying here, when the Imperial garrison are on the move, is suicidal!"

 

"Oh, because _you_ can talk," retorts the girl, and that's how Jyn Erso is introduced to Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, twenty years old, a crack shot, and fifteen feet of trouble in a five-foot frame.

 

"I'm confused," volunteers a human boy of about the same age, fair-haired with wide blue eyes and an air that reminds Jyn very strongly of Chirrut; something about that straightforward confidence.

 

"Yeah, well, me too, kid," Han says, but he sheathes his blaster. "What are you doing with the Rebel Alliance, Hallik? I heard you got thrown in jail."

 

"Which time?" Jyn parries. "You're going to have to be more specific."

 

"Hallik?" Leia says, looking puzzled.

 

"Which time?" Han says, looking thunderstruck.

 

Cassian covers his face with his hands and groans.

 

 

Over the course of the next hour and two pots of caf, several key points are clarified.

 

  1. The explosion in Towani was not actually anyone's fault, and Han got chased by Imperials because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.



 

  1. Han, Leia, Chewbacca, the boy and an assortment of droids with more than the usual complement of personality are looking for the list with Sabé Theodora's name on it, same as Jyn and Cassian are. Leia is trying to weigh up whether it would be best to give it up or not, a decision complicated by the fact that her father - before his death - earmarked the mission to locate Sabé Theodora as extremely important.



 

  1. Cassian and Jyn are not dead, despite the destruction of Scarif and captivity by a distracted garrison. Neither is Leia Organa, despite the destruction of Alderaan and captivity by a properly focused Darth Vader.



 

  1. Jyn is in fact Jyn Erso, not Lianna Hallik, and the Rebel Alliance rescued her from Wobani.



 

  1. The human boy is Luke Skywalker, who took the shot that destroyed the Death Star, and is incidentally the last of the Jedi.



 

  1. Jyn and Cassian escaped from the ship they were being held on because a group including a Wookiee terminally distracted everyone, allowing Jyn to break out of her cell, which should probably have only been a temporary holding cell. That group consisted of Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker and an old dead Jedi trying to rescue Princess Leia, which is the most surprising thing Jyn's heard since a girl dressed in blue and brown sat down opposite her and repeated Bodhi's callsign.



 

  1. Han Solo is now sort of temporarily a rebel, and although the cause sits uneasily on his shoulders Jyn can see he wants to shrug his arms into it and wear it for Leia's sake, which is the third most surprising thing Jyn has dealt with today, after the Rogue One callsign and Han Solo rescuing a princess for free.



 

  1. Tillira at Maz's cantina was telling the truth. There are posters.



 

 

"I need something stronger than caf," Cassian says, peering into the bottom of his mug.

 

Jyn just stares at the poster, which is stuck up in the Falcon's main room with insulating tape. She's still trying to get over the sweet smile and _aw shucks wasn't nothing_ wholesomeness of the boy who took up the shred of hope they passed to him through hundreds of hands, and made it into something real. Luke Skywalker makes Bodhi look so old and so frightened, and he shines so brightly that Jyn finds it hard to look him directly in the eye. And yet he's already full of questions, particularly about Bodhi and Chirrut.

 

Bodhi at least doesn't really feature on the poster. It's a series of black silhouettes posed against an enormous, graphic red and yellow explosion, the shockwave racing outwards in a way that makes Jyn's guts gripe; it's nothing like her dream on the beach at all. Jyn and Cassian are at the forefront, back to back, their faces in well-rendered profile, Jyn raising a blaster and Cassian a rifle. Slightly smaller and slightly further back are less detailed renditions of Baze and Chirrut, Chirrut holding his staff and Baze his repeater cannon. Then there are two figures at the back, more sketched in than anything else. Bodhi and Kaytoo, presumably. Jyn can tell them apart because one is a droid.

 

ROGUE ONE, says the poster. THEY BROUGHT US HOPE.

 

"They've made you look taller," Cassian tells Jyn, nose-deep in another mug of caf, probably spiked. Han Solo is surprisingly kind at all the strangest moments; Jyn remembers the way he stroked her hair and touched her face with clumsy delicacy, remembers thinking that he was far too soft for a smuggler. But that was years ago, and if Jyn is harder than she was then, Han probably is too.

 

"Well, I'm not going to complain about that," Jyn says.

 

Princess Leia coughs. "They only printed a few hundred before we found out you were alive and stopped," she says, "but of course I kept one. For the archivists. You're Alderaanian, by blood at least, and you made the Alliance's greatest victory so far possible."

 

"Are any of them still alive?" Cassian asks.

 

Princess Leia flinches. "One or two."

 

She walks away. Not that there's far to go, in a ship the size of the Falcon.

 

"You want to go back in, don't you," Jyn says to the poster instead of to Cassian's face.

 

"Yes," Cassian admits. "If there's a good time, it's now." There's a pause. "Jyn, I know..."

 

Jyn waits.

 

Cassian tries again. "This was never your cause," he says finally. "You never wanted any of this. You've done more than most people will ever do in a lifetime for the Alliance. You don't have to come too. You can keep the ship and keep going."

 

Jyn shakes her head. "I'm not giving up on you now," she says. "And I've had it with the Empire."

 

Cassian smiles very slowly.

 

"Where you go, I go," Jyn says, and smiles herself.

 

***

 

Jyn knows General Draven when she sees him, and - while Cassian has never confirmed it - she knows who gave the kill order for her father. She won't let him have Cassian too.

 

Cassian is walking away to his debrief, has one hand on the nondescript and rather shabby door Draven indicated, when Jyn snaps the safety catch off her blaster very loudly, and ostentatiously sets it to kill.

 

Cassian picks up the noise faster and turns to frown at her; taking Cassian's cue, Draven turns too, and finds Jyn sitting cross-legged on some packing cases, picking her nails with a blade, her blaster laid beside her, lights glowing as it charges up to kill strength.

 

Draven raises his sandy eyebrows. His receding hairline and cold grey eyes are exactly as Jyn remembers. "What is it, Erso?"

 

"Either Cassian comes out in one piece, unharmed, or neither of you does," Jyn informs him. She smiles humourlessly.

 

Cassian pinches the bridge of his nose, hiding half his face, but Jyn can see the tiniest quirk of a smile. Chewbacca, who was loading packing cases - they're far too heavy for a single human, and Luke Skywalker is currently addressing himself to the damaged innards of the nearest forklift truck, covered in grease and sprockets as if he weren't the last great hope of the Jedi - howls his laughter.

 

Draven's smile is a perfect mirror for Jyn's. "Don't you trust the Rebel Alliance, Erso?"

 

"Occasionally," Jyn says. "I'll trust you more if Cassian comes out alive."

 

***

 

Jyn sits and waits. Chewbacca loads all the packing cases, but brings her a couple of empty ones to sit on instead; he's always had a fine eye for loyalty. Jyn thanks him and tells him she'll buy him a drink some time.

 

Chewbacca growls back that he'll consider himself well repaid if Jyn will just give him some advance warning before shooting up the Rebel Alliance's intelligence wing.

 

"I'll do that, Chewbacca," Jyn says, flipping her knife end over end and tossing it from hand to hand the way Saw taught her to.

 

Well before Jyn starts to think that reminding Draven she's out here and waiting would be a good idea, she hears Princess Leia's brisk tread on the concrete of the loading bay.

 

"May I join you?" Princess Leia says, squinting up at Jyn, who is sitting on top of a crate as high as the princess is tall.

 

"Sure, your highness," Jyn tells her, and goes to offer the princess a hand up.

 

Leia, though, tosses her datapad and stylus onto the top of the crate and scrambles up the same way Jyn herself did. Dressed in heavy white jacket, trousers and boots, the coat marked with rank bars Jyn is unfamiliar with, her dark hair braided up into a tight, practical coronet, she looks like she means business. "I have questions," she announces, once she's settled on top of the crate.

 

Jyn idly contemplates pushing her off again, and decides that it would be a bad idea. "Really."

 

"Yes, and I thought you'd like me better than Draven."

 

"I think there are Hutts I like better than Draven." Jyn nods at the door Cassian passed through. "He's in there, with Cassian."

 

 "I know," Leia says, matter-of-fact.

 

"If Cassian's not out of there soon I'm going in after him."

 

"I know that too." Leia types something on her datapad.

 

"You don't sound put off." Jyn's curious; this woman, Jyn thinks, likes her orders to be obeyed, and identifies passionately with the Rebel Alliance. You'd think she'd be more annoyed by Jyn threatening a senior Rebel.

 

Leia gives her a look of absolute clarity from those large brown eyes. "I'm not." She goes back to her datapad for a moment, and Jyn watches the door. "Are you in love with him?"

 

Startled, Jyn looks back at her. "No," she says, instinctive but - she thinks - correct.

 

"Really?" Leia looks dubious.

 

"Yes," Jyn says. She turns the knife end-over-end again, flips it up into the air and lets it stick in the packing crate between her knees. "But he's part of me."

 

Leia nods slowly. She looks like she's willing to pretend she understands. There's a silence, and it's not uncomfortable.

 

"Tell me what happened," she says, and before Leia's clear, bell-like voice Jyn feels a certain compulsion to speak. Mostly out of perversity, she tries to fight it; deflects and delays.

 

"When? A lot's happened, your highness."

 

"Start with Scarif," Leia says. "Then carry on until you get to here."

 

Jyn licks her lips and thinks about what to say next. She knows she and Cassian have been separated to tell their stories in the hope that they haven't yet decided on a common one, and won't be able to give each other cues. That's foolish. After Eadu, Jyn and Cassian have never taken on any task without making sure they're working from the same starting point. They don't need cues.

 

Nobody in the Rebellion has any reason to know that, but, Jyn thinks, they might have guessed. It's not flattering that they didn't.

 

Jyn licks her lips again and clears her throat; pats her blaster to be sure it's still there, fixes her eyes on the door Cassian walked through. She lines up her thoughts and starts to talk.

 

"The Imperials caught us when we were trying to get down from the communications tower," she begins, and the whole tale reels out of her. She hadn't thought it was so long, but it takes hours to tell, allowing for questions from Princess Leia. She doesn't keep back anything, except for the exact location of Amira and Matariki's home, and the exact nature of their business. The princess very clearly makes a note, but doesn't actually press for details, not yet. The way she works, holding things in reserve and letting you see that she is, hiding her next question in plain sight while you're distracted by what she isn't asking you, that's... familiar. Had Jyn had anything much to hide, she would have been caught out once or twice by now.

 

"Cassian taught you to question people," Jyn says, when she's finished her recap and the princess is re-reading and signing off her summary.

 

Princess Leia looks up at her, perfectly straight-faced. "Him and others," she says. "Well spotted."

 

"I know how he works," Jyn says, and glances at the door. He's taking a long time. "Excuse me."

 

She hops down from the packing crate, blaster in hand, and walks quietly over to listen at the door. She can hear Cassian, and he doesn't sound hurried, or concerned, or angry. She hovers for a second, then sheathes the blaster. If he's in no danger, he won't like being interrupted; her earlier declaration that she'd kill Draven if he was murdered had been pushing her luck and the bounds of their relationship. If he is in danger, he knows she's here. He won't die silently.

 

She returns to Princess Leia and scales the packing crate. "He seems fine."

 

The princess nods, as regally as if she sent Jyn to check, and Jyn asks the question _she's_ been keeping in reserve. She has also learnt a thing or two from Cassian Andor and his ability to pick a moment.

 

"Why is Sabé Theodora important?"

 

Princess Leia goes still, and looks at Jyn like she's trying to get the measure of her. Jyn stares back.

 

"She knows who my birth mother is," Princess Leia answers, eventually.

 

Jyn blinks. She hadn't known the princess was adopted; certainly she doesn't look much like Bail Organa, who Jyn glimpsed before his death, but Jyn had assumed Leia resembled her mother. Maybe she does; but which one?

 

"Does that matter?" Jyn says.

 

"My father thought so," Princess Leia says, icy composure as undisturbed as the permafrost which blankets Hoth.

 

Jyn is silent for a moment. "Then it matters," she says. "Do you know who your birth mother is?"

 

"No," Princess Leia says, which surprises Jyn. "My parents told me they'd tell me when the time was right, and then -"

 

 _And then_.

 

Jyn nods.

 

She wouldn't mind breaking a woman out of a labour camp. She doesn't think Cassian will mind, either.

 

By the time Cassian reappears, Jyn and Princess Leia have successfully brainstormed six different possibilities for the location of Sabé Theodora, ranked them in order of likelihood, and lined up various leads for confirming or denying her presence.

 

"I'm alive," Cassian says.

 

"Good," Jyn says. She looks around, but Draven has evidently sneaked out the back.

 

"Try to stay that way, captain," Princess Leia says.

 

***

 

As a base, Hoth is pretty much full to bursting, but whoever gets moved to make space for Jyn and Cassian doesn't audibly complain.

 

"Sorry we couldn't get you separate spaces," says the harassed Rodian who introduced himself as a quartermaster's aide. "It was this or one of you sleeping on your ship."

 

"This is fine," Cassian says, and Jyn nods. "Thank you for making space for us."

 

The Rodian looks like he's about to go and say something to do with Rogue One - there's been a lot of staring and whispering, and a few very serious people thanking Jyn and Cassian for their service, which makes Jyn profoundly uncomfortable - but then his datapad beeps, and he swears and hurries away.

 

Cassian goes to collect their few personal belongings from the ship. Jyn goes to help Luke Skywalker fix some landing lights. She isn't sure why she agreed to this task, or why Luke asked her; she thinks it has to do with his curiosity about Chirrut and Baze and the Whills.

 

He certainly asks a lot of questions about them, but there's a snowstorm raging and that makes it easy for Jyn to pretend she hasn't heard. She knows Luke needs - and has probably earned - her information, and she will tell him what he wants to know, soon. Just not yet.

 

In her head Chirrut is smiling brightly and attributing his fiendishly lucky survival to the Force, and Baze is exclaiming **_I_** _protected you!_ with the mild frustration of a man who has been having this argument with his husband for twenty years, and doesn't care if he wins or loses. Chirrut is not a sage. Baze is not a temple guardian. Neither of them has ever spoken of the way the Force moves, or closed their eyes to it with the determination of a newly-minted atheist. Jyn has certainly never listened out for the Force and heard Chirrut call her _little sister_ the way Baze once did.

 

Jyn wants to keep these things between her and Cassian, for the moment, and Cassian still doesn't know about that last bit. It's the only thing he doesn't yet know about her, although she dislikes keeping it from him.

 

Jyn staggers back into the room they've been allotted, still wrapped in what feels like hundreds of heavy padded layers that all zip and tie and button in different ways. She dumped the outermost layers when she came in from the snowstorm, but she's still drowning in fabric and heavy boots, the laces of which are knotted all to hell. Cassian gets up from the bunk he was sitting and reading on, and helps her free herself from the heavy gauntlets, inner coat and overtrousers, her fingers freezing cold and fumbling with the simplest catches. Both of them pick at her laces for several minutes, and Jyn has just loosened one knot and is trying to prise the matching boot off when the words tumble over her lips.

 

"Sometimes I think I hear Chirrut."

 

Cassian looks up at her very seriously for a few moments, then goes back to removing her boot. Jyn's mouth is dry and her heart is hammering; she bends her head and works the other boot off with her stiff fingers. By the time she's managed it, Cassian has taken the remaining boot off, and one of his hands is resting on her knee, large and warm and thoughtful.

 

"Do you think I'm mad?" Jyn says, half-scared and half-defensive.

 

"I think you're only as crazy as I am," Cassian answers, and leans up to kiss her, slow and quiet.

 

Jyn crosses her ankles behind his back and slides her hands into his hair, leaning forward into his arms.

 

The kyber crystal of her necklace hangs between them both.

 

***

 

"So you're coming with us to get this Theowhatsit woman," Han says, cornering Jyn in the mess.

 

Jyn rolls her eyes. "We're going to find her, and then _maybe_ we'll take you with us when we go and get her. Why do you care? Not been paid yet?"

 

"Nahhh," Han says, and looks at Cassian. "Do this bunch of banthas ever pay up?"

 

"Some of us are here for the cause," Cassian says, with a very clear sarcastic inflection that could go any of several ways. Jyn and Cassian both know that Han hasn't exactly pressed hard for the money he's owed, probably because Han is, increasingly, _also_ here for the cause (with a side of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker).

 

Jyn rolls her eyes again, harder. "Don't waste your energy, Cassian. You know how much you enjoyed arguing with me on Eadu."

 

"Eh," Cassian says, and finishes off the last of his root mash with the efficiency of the hungry. He stands, scooping up his tray. "Solo," he says.

 

Han nods and smirks, as Han is wont to smirk.

 

Cassian flicks his eyes sideways at Jyn; she lifts her chin very slightly.

 

He leaves.

 

"He didn't say goodbye to you," says Han Solo, intergalactic-standard cloth-head. "What's his deal, anyway?"

 

Jyn ignores the first remark, which only goes to show that Han Solo is criminally hapless with men and women of any species. "Some hopeless orphans and runaway kids get picked up and raised by rebellions, not criminals. Apparently."

 

"If they survive." Cogs are very clearly turning in Han Solo's head. "Hey, wasn't that your story, anyway? The real one. Not your cover. You were picked up by some rebel who died?"

 

Everyone knows who Jyn is now, and sometimes that makes her _itch_. It constrains her ability to reinvent herself like you wouldn't believe, and it makes it very difficult to go unnoticed. "Yeah, but it turns out that being left behind at sixteen doesn't fill you with enthusiasm for the blood brotherhood of rebellion."

 

Han blinks repeatedly. Lucky for him he's still handsome when he's confused, really.

 

"What's your deal?" Jyn asks, turning the question around.

 

"I want my -"

 

"Banthashit," Jyn says succinctly. "If you'd tried you'd have your money by now." She swings her feet up onto the bench and stretches her legs out, cradling her mug of caf in her hands. "Which of them is it? The princess or the flyboy?" She eyes Han with sudden interest. "Or both?"

 

Han splutters a great deal and goes extremely pink, which is absolutely fascinating. "It's not like that. Her Worshipfulness is too high and mighty to look at me twice -"

 

"She looks at you _all the time_."

 

"She's constantly blowing hot and cold on me, can't ever tell if I'm going to get smiled at or snapped at -"

 

Jyn has little patience with that. She knows Han is smart enough to know when he's pulling Princess Leia's pigtails; he's always been an attention-seeker, even back when he was running with Lando Calrissian, and their combined charisma took up all the oxygen in any given room. "Invest in a kriffing brain, Solo. She lost her entire family and planet last year and she's the public face of a rebellion with a billion-credit price on her head. Do you think that's always going to be easy? Do you think you could've handled that, at twenty? Stop asking for her time and effort when she has a crisis on her hands."

 

Han says nothing for a bit.

 

Jyn addresses herself to her caf for several minutes. Then she snorts. " _Twenty_. Both of them. You're a cradle-robber, Han Solo."

 

Han rubs his hands over his face. "I know, but the kid could bend my mind in half with two words, and Leia, she's..." He falls silent, and stares across the mess, looking lovesick. "She's a force of nature," he says finally. "They both are. Different, though."

 

Jyn feels a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. Chewbacca must be losing his mind having to live with this.

 

"You can't talk, anyway," Han says, making a spirited attempt to rally. He puts one foot up on the bench and grins at Jyn like he has all the answers. "I've seen you with that spy."

 

"Cassian," Jyn says.

 

"Captain Andor. Never thought you were the kind to join _the cause_ -" Han's air quotes, like everything else about him, are unnecessarily dramatic - "for a pretty face."

 

"I joined _the cause_ to save my father," Jyn points out, draining her caf and leaving out the bit where Cassian had nearly murdered her father in cold blood. If necessary, she too can do melodrama. "The Empire killed all three of my parents, enslaved my father, murdered four of the best friends I ever had, and tortured me, Han. I don't need help motivating myself to try and take chunks out of it."

 

Han looks a bit taken aback. Jyn almost feels bad, because he wasn't completely wrong. She can't stand Hoth, which is cold, cramped and a rebel-only zone, and she has few friends among the other rebels: most of them are either put off by the fact that she's Galen Erso's daughter or in awe of Rogue One. If it weren't for the fact that she accepts Cassian's judgement of the situation and he thinks it's best to stay here for the moment, the Alliance wouldn't see her for dust.

 

"Did I ever thank you for choosing to attack the Death Star?"

 

"That was an accident," Han says. "Wouldn't have done it if we hadn't been yanked in by the tractor beam. And then Luke insisted, and you know what he's like when he insists." His honest streak has always been a liability for a smuggler, but maybe it sits better on a rebel's shoulders. Jyn wouldn't know; her willingness to be dishonest is pretty important to her role as a rebel.

 

"Well. Sometimes things work out well." The words are bitter on her tongue; she finds it difficult to think of this as a world that's worked out well, when Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze and Kaytoo paid for the Death Star plans with their lives.

 

Han smiles, and then he squints at her with the thin veneer of mock-seriousness he likes to wear when he's joking. Maybe Princess Leia should be advised that lightening up a little is key to dealing with Han without giving into the temptation to strangle him; she does take everything extremely seriously, which is perfectly natural in a woman whose entire planet was murdered in front of her. Jyn's heart always aches when she thinks of the destruction of Alderaan; even now, she feels as responsible as she did the day Amira told her the news.

 

"Don't tell me you've become an optimist in your old age, Jyn Erso," Han Solo says.

 

Jyn toasts him with her empty caf mug. "Rebellions are _built_ on hope," she says, heavy on the irony.

 

Han laughs.

 

***

 

By a pleasant irony, Sabé Theodora is being held on Wobani - though in a different block and under a much greater level of security than anyone ever bothered to restrain Jyn with. Jyn hopes she'll be able to knock a few of her least favourite guards over the head.

 

"Sweet memories," Jyn says dryly, paging through the information they've got. She raises her eyebrows at the guard rotation considered necessary to keep Sabé Theodora, a slim, short Naboo woman in her mid-forties, of good family and unblemished career of public service, under control. "What do they think she is? A Jedi warrior?"

 

"I think the handmaidens of one of the queens fought alongside the Jedi," Cassian muses. "Can you blow up a durasteel fence quietly?"

 

"No, Cassian. You can't blow up anything quietly."

 

"I meant relatively." Cassian sends Jyn the file on Sabé Theodora's known history, skills, interests, contacts and areas of expertise. It's an intimidatingly long list, and given that it starts with _background: personal attendant and fighting decoy to Queen Padmé Amidala, aged 12-16_ , Jyn is beginning to understand the caution displayed on Wobani. She's amazed they haven't just killed her off, but maybe Princess Leia is right and the identity of a Rebel figurehead's birth mother is enough to keep Sabé alive while she keeps it to herself.

 

"Find me a decent laser-cutter and I'll burn you a nice big hole in it," Jyn says absently, eyebrows climbing her forehead as she reads about Sabé Theodora's exploits.

 

"Skywalker's coming," Cassian reminds her. "Borrow his lightsaber."

 

 

Jyn does not borrow Skywalker's lightsaber, but she does enjoy watching him cut a double-strength durasteel fence like a putting knife through butter, without - key point - tripping any of the alarms, which weren't there when Jyn was in residence. She also enjoys watching him trick multiple guards into believing they don't exist, which is by far the easiest, cheapest and least bloody method of getting past an Imperial garrison Jyn has ever witnessed. Jyn will cheerfully work with a Jedi any day the Rebel Alliance asks her to.

 

Unfortunately, he gets carried away with being a Jedi, so that in a scrap he's concentrating on duelling a stormtrooper and misses the second stormtrooper, who cracks him efficiently over the head with the butt of a rifle. Jyn gives up on a quiet, simple extraction, shoots the second stormtrooper point-blank before he can fuck anything else up, helps Cassian and Chewbacca stuff the defunct stormtroopers into an unused cell, entrusts Luke to Chewbacca, and follows Cassian down the corridor where they think Sabé Theodora is being kept.

 

She is where they expect her to be. It's a gilded cage - a suite of furnished rooms, and Jyn bets she's never had to break rocks or mine - but a cage nonetheless. All the furniture is bolted to the floor, and Madam Sabé is thinner and looks older and more strained than the holos of her suggested.

 

The door does not respond to Cassian's codes. Jyn blows it off, which causes Madam Sabé, most sensibly, to hide and attack without asking questions first. Jyn has her nightstick wrested from her and nearly gets strangled; handmaidens of the Queen of Naboo, retired or not, do not mess around.

 

"This is a rescue," Cassian announces, retrieving Jyn's nightstick and jabbing the nerve cluster under Madam Sabé's arm until she releases Jyn's throat. "We're with the Rebel Alliance. I hope you're feeling well enough to run."

 

There's a fierce light in Sabé Theodora's eyes that Jyn will like very much when she can breathe again properly.

 

"Yes," Madam Sabé says, and departs with nothing more than the clothes on her back, head lifted regally high. The only delay lies in stealing a blaster off one of the dead stormtroopers for her use, Han's covering fire from the Falcon is a thing of beauty, and Madam Sabé runs very respectably for a woman who's been jailed for a year.  All in all, everything goes much more smoothly than Jyn and Cassian had had a right to expect, except for the part where Madam Sabé remarks that she hasn't seen such a disreputable ship since the Clone Wars and Han visibly has to choke back a smart response, and the bit where the last hope of the Jedi is currently lying in his bunk with an ice pack on his head, staring at the ceiling and trying not to be sick while the world moves around him.

 

Princess Leia meets Sabé Theodora when she's returning from Luke's bunk, having checked on him and found him to be just as alive as he was half an hour ago, and not noticeably mentally impaired. She announces this in slightly pithier language from around a corner, and then steps out and comes face to face with Madam Sabé.

 

Sabé Theodora almost faints. Cassian, who happens to be nearest, catches her as she staggers.

 

Princess Leia, dressed in a white tunic and scarf and brown boots laced up to the knee, with her hair braided in three loops from a single point on the back of her head, looks more like the princess than the warrior today; but when she looks at Sabé Theodora, Jyn thinks she just looks very young.

 

"You are _so_ like your mother," Sabé Theodora says. She regains her footing and reaches out to touch Princess Leia's face, her hands trembling. Princess Leia steps forward to meet her, both of them slow and hesitant, as if they're not sure whether or not they're dreaming.

 

Jyn is the only one properly placed to see them in profile, and it suddenly occurs to her that Sabé Theodora could almost be Princess Leia's mother, except that Jyn knows for a fact Princess Leia's mother is - both of Princess Leia's mothers are - dead. Princess Leia and Madam Sabé are roughly the same height and build; their complexions, colouring and features are similar. It’s almost like Madam Sabé was _supposed_ to resemble the princess - or, perhaps, the princess’s birth mother.

 

Jyn retires to give the two of them space, and also to find out what happened to Queen Padmé Amidala. Jyn discovers that she became a senator, and an outspoken opponent of the establishment of the Empire, and that she died in the last days of an advanced pregnancy, at roughly the same time that Palpatine crowned himself emperor. Complications, apparently.

 

Jyn takes leave to doubt that. Rich young women on Core worlds don't die of obstetric complications; prenatal care is too good. The pictures of Padmé Amidala lying in state, among the cortège that took her to her tomb, show a woman who looks pregnant. But poor young women on Outer Rim worlds _do_ die in childbirth, and Jyn has known a few. She helped bury them. A slim woman might still look pregnant, even if she wasn't - especially if the embalmers made sure of it.

 

Jyn shakes her head, turns off her datapad, and goes to relieve Han on the flight deck. It's his turn to go and annoy Luke into maintaining consciousness. Princess Leia and Madam Sabé are talking quietly, heads together and looking more alike than ever.

 

Jyn sits down in the pilot's seat and wonders why it matters that Princess Leia is Padmé Amidala's daughter.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! :) I would like to thank Radi and Celeste for the beta, again, and the delightful people who've commented to tell me how much they liked this fic. If anyone is intrigued by the section talking about Reset, that's a Star Wars festival I came up with myself, and I wrote about it in this Finn/Rey/Poe fic. http://archiveofourown.org/works/8436313
> 
> I would also like to note once more that my Spanish is not what it used to be, and if anyone has any corrections, they would be gratefully received.

Jyn has never seen anyone as angry as Cassian is when he sees the Rogue One memorial. She doesn't know anything about it at first; she's on the other side of the base, virtuously engaged in taking stock of the armoury. She's Galen Erso's daughter and she has a fine eye for weaponry; she's Saw Gerrera's ward and she knows how to take things apart. (She doesn't know, because no-one's ever said, that her need to act, to keep her hands occupied, comes direct from Lyra Erso.)

 

She and Wedge Antilles, whose job this is not but who is stuck with it nonetheless, can hear Cassian shouting from the armoury. Jyn stands, and - out of habit - loads and charges a blaster. She has very seldom heard Cassian raise his voice. He's a deceptively softly-spoken man, and normally she does all the shouting that needs doing.

 

"- _hijos de puta madre,_ ** _quién_** _se atrevió - qué vergüenza, qué_ ** _ignominia_** \- Jyn!"

 

"Whoa," Wedge Antilles says, rather weakly; apparently, he knows what Cassian’s saying better than Jyn does. He looks like he might be about to say something about language in front of ladies, a tic which even long exposure to Princess Leia and her capacity for cursing Han Solo all the way to Corellia and back again has not erased from some of the Rebellion's more stolid stalwarts.

 

"The only bit of that I understood was the sons of a bitch part," Jyn says helpfully, just to see him swallow his tongue with shock. "Cassian, what is it? Do you need me to shoot something?"

 

"No. And I can shoot for myself, anyway." Cassian grabs her by the arm. "Come and see this - _this_." He brandishes his other hand, a brief, frustrated gesture that Jyn finds far easier to understand than a torrent of Alderaanian. She's picking up bits, because Cassian speaks Alderaanian as if he's worried the language will die out tomorrow, but the faster he talks and the thicker his Festian accent gets the harder Jyn finds it understanding him. He speaks most clearly when he talks to Princess Leia; formally, politely, enunciating all his consonants instead of letting them slide all over the place.

 

Jyn detaches his hand from her arm and shoves the blaster into her belt.

 

"I was cleaning that," Wedge says plaintively. Jyn doesn't dignify that with a response.

 

 

She sees immediately why Cassian is so angry. The memorial is a sort of display; several portable screens with flickering holograms projected. It's in a slightly out-of-the-way place, near the archives. According to Cassian, who is walking so fast Jyn has to trot to keep up, it was in pride of place for about a month, and then the Rebellion found out they were alive, and the memorial became more controversial than anyone had ever suspected.

 

"Well, it's nice workmanship," Jyn says, keeping her breathing even and eyeing the artistic laser-cut panel in the centre of the display. Her impromptu little speech to Mon Mothma and the rest of the council has been very carefully carved on it. By hand.

 

Cassian lets out a disgusted noise, and storms away, but only for a couple of paces. Jyn folds her arms and leans back on one heel, squinting at the display for effect, keenly aware of the fact that they have a small and growing audience.

 

"You've spelled Whills wrong," she says. _Breath_. "And Chirrut wasn't a Jedi." _Breath_. "Also, Baze was a Guardian of the Whills, not a Sage." _Breath_. "What an awful picture of Cassian." _Breath_. "And that's a really lousy mugshot of me. Honestly, I've seen two-bit Imperial backwater customs guards do better, but then I suppose you were planning to kill me off and never have to see me again." _Breath_.

 

Cassian has come back to stand at her shoulder, still seething. She hasn't seen him angry like this since Eadu, and then, she thinks, he was angry at himself. The rage he showed when she told him of Alderaan's destruction was quite different; it had been born of despair.

 

"Minor factual corrections," says someone smoothly. "Thank you for notifying us. I'm sure better holos can be arranged."

 

"Do you think you could put Kaytoo and Bodhi Rook in your precious memorial then, too?" Jyn enquiries politely, and swivels on her heel to stare them down. Cassian moves with her, with that easy, unobtrusive killer's grace. "Do you think they might be worth remembering, too? Do you think maybe you'd never have got those plans if Kaytoo hadn't held the vault against hundreds of stormtroopers? Do you think we would ever have even made it to Scarif if Bodhi hadn't flown us there? If he hadn't known how to get in?"

 

 _Breath_ , and this one is deep and shaky, her ribcage heaving with her own flash-fire rage. Nobody says anything.

 

"I can understand-" and Jyn gulps down her automatic defence of Galen Erso, who was both complicit and not - "why you left my father off. But what made you think Kaytoo didn't belong? Did you think he wasn't human enough? Did you think he was just a tool?" _Breath_. "And what made you leave Bodhi off?" She catches each and every person listening with a glare; if they dare to flinch now she might just go for her blaster to get their attention. She spits the next two sentences. "Did you think he wasn't _human_ enough? Did you think he was just a _tool_?"

 

Cassian sucks in a deep, viciously satisfied breath, and she doesn't even have to look at him to know his teeth are half-bared.

 

"Bodhi Rook gave up everything he knew to give us all a chance," Jyn says, and her voice drops without her even meaning it to, soft and deadly. "He faced torture to pass you vital information. He came without weapons in his hands to save your lives, and when none of you would risk yourselves - because I recognise some of you bastards who wouldn't stand and fight, don't think I don't - he laid down his life to give you hope."

 

 _Breath_.

 

"And you've left him out," Jyn says, nodding her head like she understands - which, in a twisted way, she does, she knows why they did this - and smiling, quite without humour. "You've left him out. Because he's just an Imperial, and he doesn't count." She stares at her feet for a second, and then looks up, catches all of their eyes again. "You realise, if you win this war, the Republic you want so much will rule over people like him, as well as people like you? People whose first instinct isn't to rally to a rebel standard, and who still aren't bad people?" She snorts. "Forget it. You should pray there are a hundred people as brave and honest as Bodhi Rook left in the galaxy. The Imperials don't want them, and I've seen what you do to them."

 

 _Look what you did to Cassian_ , she thinks. She resents the way the Rebellion has asked Cassian to swim in blood, even knowing that he chose it freely. _You're no better than Saw, and you're a fuck of a lot less honest._ She draws her blaster, which produces a certain commotion in the crowd.

 

"Oh, get over yourselves," Jyn says scornfully, and shoots out the memorial's power supply. All the holos die at once. She kicks out, and the interlinked panels go over with a crash. "That," she informs her audience, "is a pile of banthashit. Melt down the steel and make it something useful."

 

She marches away. Cassian follows her, and she's a little surprised when he nudges her into a small corridor off one of the main docking bays, presses her against a wall with his hands on her shoulders, and kisses her to within an inch of her life. Jyn kisses back enthusiastically, curling her fingers into his silky dark hair.

 

"I missed your last big speech," he says when they break apart. "This was... this was a good one."

 

"Did it help?" Jyn asks, and means both 'will they do better now' and 'will you feel better now'.

 

"Maybe," Cassian says. The corners of his eyes crease up.

 

Jyn wraps her arms around his chest and drags him in closer.

 

"Excuse me," Han Solo says, poorly timed and far too amused.

 

"You're excused, Solo," Cassian growls into the tender skin behind Jyn's right ear.

 

"That's rebel-speak for fuck off," Jyn adds.

 

Han, who does more or less know when he's not wanted, fucks off.

 

***

 

Half an hour later Jyn makes it back to stocktaking. She still has her purloined blaster and she's collected several red hickeys down the side of her neck.

 

"Where were we?" she says, sitting back down next to Antilles, who looks like he's recently been electrocuted.

 

"Uh," Antilles says, "you got a -" He gestures illustratively at his neck.

 

Jyn undoes her bun and ties it up into a higher, tighter ponytail, scraping up the shorter pieces at the front to get them out of the way. Let the rebels stare. She doesn't care if the entire Alliance knows, which, given Han's loose tongue, they probably do by now.

 

"I'm sure that's fraternisation," Antilles tells her, plainly fascinated. "To go with the insubordination."

 

Jyn looks at him, hoping she's conveying the total lack of interest she feels. "Build a bridge and get over it," she says.

 

***

 

"Some people would find your presence more trouble than it's worth, Sergeant Erso," Mon Mothma remarks, having summoned her by means of Princess Leia. Mothma's the only one who ever bothers with Jyn's courtesy title any more, unless someone's spectacularly angry with Jyn. Jyn doesn't think she ever earned it anyway, and really doesn't care.

 

"That's unfortunate," Jyn says, sitting on the very edge of the nice chair in Mothma's office.

 

"They find you difficult."

 

Jyn honestly doesn't know what to say to that for a minute. She has a hazy notion you shouldn't shrug at politicians, so she stifles that impulse at birth, and then says: "This is a rebellion, isn't it? I rebel."

 

There's a slight, awkward pause.

 

"Ma'am," Jyn says belatedly.

 

Mon Mothma does a much better job than Princess Leia of hiding her smile. "Consider yourself reprimanded."

 

"Yes. Ma'am."

 

***

 

Jyn doesn't often have occasion to visit the quartermasters, but every now and then something comes up. She drops a disc containing one of these things on the desk of Kes Dameron, who is medium-height and kind of square and good-humoured. He's also married to the pilot who accompanied Jyn and Cassian on the last mission. Jyn likes Shara Bey - she's got charm and wit and good looks going for her, and once she actually made Cassian laugh out loud - and if she says Kes can do something useful with some of the intelligence Cassian and Jyn scooped up on the side, Jyn's happy to kick it his way.

 

"Hey," she says, when Dameron leans back and raises his eyebrows. "Your wife says you like to play the stockmarket. How do you feel about insider trading?"

 

Dameron picks up the disc between finger and thumb. "Shara always sends me the best anniversary presents. What is it?"

 

"Information on the money markets of Mon Calamari," Jyn replies. "You'll need to move fast."

 

"I can do that," Dameron says confidently, feeding the disc to a computer. "You and Captain Andor pick this up... somewhere?"

 

Jyn nods.

 

"You're a good team." Green numbers scroll on a black screen, and Dameron purses his lips, smiles like one of those evil little fishy things the mobster they'd robbed had been feeding his victims to. "Thanks a _lot_. It's a pleasure working with you, drop by with more of this any time."

 

Jyn flicks a salute that would have every drill sergeant in the Rebellion going to lie down in a darkened room, and leaves.

 

***

 

Princess Leia has taken to holding a ceremony of remembrance where you name your dead, followed by a massive party where everyone tries to give themselves alcohol poisoning. She calls it Reset, for reasons that have passed Jyn by.

 

Jyn makes a point of naming both her parents, Saw Gerrera, and the entirety of Rogue One. There are a lot of people who don't look too pleased with the bits that involve a defector, a partially complicit scientist, a droid, and a militant, but there are a lot of people who either don't know or don't care what the names mean.

 

The party afterwards is pretty wild. Jyn's warm enough, which is unusual. There's laughter and tears. Luke Skywalker is stripped to the waist, glowing paint patterned haphazardly over his torso. Chewbacca is armwrestling someone. Kes Dameron is sitting on Shara Bey's lap; Shara, Alderaanian, is still dressed in solemn, crumpled white for the ceremony of remembrance.

 

Cassian's shirt is white and immaculate. Jyn has no idea where he got it, or the white scarf bordered with little cotton rounds he draped around her neck without explaining himself, but she's trying not to spill  the drink Yejide brought her on either. The drink's purple, and Jyn can't tell if it's actually glowing or if that's just the light.

 

It tastes good, anyway. She sets her back to Cassian's shoulder and leans against him, staring out into the middle distance. They're mostly being left alone; it escaped no-one's notice that Cassian and Jyn between them named every Rebellion soldier who died on the surface of Scarif. So they're being given 'space'.

 

Jyn knows they were memorialised officially, but she wonders, sometimes, if anyone would have remembered to include them in smaller, more personal acts of remembrance like the names at Reset. Someone might have named Cassian, though Jyn's noticed he keeps himself to himself and has few personal friends, but Jyn's inclined to think that the rest of them would have passed out of the memory of the rebel fighters, nothing more than propaganda holos and blank silhouettes.

 

One of Cassian's arms goes round her shoulders, warm and heavy. "That's not true."

 

Jyn realises she must have said some of that aloud, and also that Yejide's drink was stronger than she was expecting.

 

"Princess Leia would have remembered," Cassian continues. "This is her show. And she has a good heart; she pays her debts. She would have remembered."

 

Jyn is silent for a moment, and then nods, conceding the point. She knows Leia a little now, and is fully prepared to believe that the younger woman has entire lists of martyrs for the Rebellion that will not be forgotten while Leia has one more stubborn breath to draw. Jyn makes very sure to keep to herself her exasperated thought that if Han ever wants any part of Leia's heart, he's going to have to learn that you have to join the cause, not compete with it. That's how these firebrands _work_.

 

Jyn would fight the Empire wherever she went, after Scarif, but she stays with the Rebellion specifically because Cassian is here. She still doesn't think she loves him, but he's part of her; the death-light of the Death Star's laser forged a bond between them that shows no sign of weakening. And she's not going to ask Cassian to leave the cause he has dedicated his life to from childhood, not when it more or less fits her objectives anyway. Life without Cassian is a kind of loneliness she doesn't want to contemplate.

 

Cassian flicks the back of her hand covering her mouth, oblivious. "What are you thinking?"

 

Jyn drops her hand. "Nothing," she lies.

 

"You want to get out of here?"

 

"No," Jyn says. There's something beautiful about the sheer life the ice hall contains right now. She isn't tired of watching people be happy, not when all she sees, half the time, is grief and destruction. "Not yet."

 

"Okay," Cassian says peaceably, and shifts so that he is sitting astride the bench they're on, his back up against a wall, Jyn's back resting against his chest.

 

Jyn finishes her drink.

 

"I'm glad we're not dead," Cassian says pensively.

 

Jyn laughs so hard she honestly thinks she might be sick.

 

***

 

Something's worrying Cassian, and he's not telling Jyn the full truth. Jyn bottles up her resentment until the day he's gone for a week, and then Jyn is left prowling the corridors of Hoth, annoying Kes Dameron, listening out without ever meaning to for mutters about Galen Erso and his hellish work. It makes her angry, on top of the edginess she feels when separated from Cassian. He's not supposed to keep her in the dark, even if Jyn knows there are some things he'll never tell her; he hides those better, and whatever this is, he's either not trying to hide it properly, or he _can't_ hide it.

 

That scares her. Cassian can hide anything. Why can't he hide this?

 

She's ready to yell at him when he appears in the doorway. But his eyes are wild and he looks hunted, and something stops her mouth and makes her get up to follow him when he jerks his head sideways.

 

"What the fuck," she says viciously when he drags her into a side room, but he shushes her, hand over her mouth.

 

"Brace yourself," he says.

 

Jyn slaps his hand away and opens her mouth to shout.

 

"They're building another one," Cassian says, harsh raw whisper, reddened eyes that haven't slept for days. "Another Death Star."

 

Jyn's legs give way beneath her. Cassian drops to the floor with her, both of them uneven, ungainly, staggering like nothing works any more.

 

"I'm sorry," he says. "Until now it was less than whispers. We're still not certain."

 

"But you're sure," Jyn says, through lips that feel numb.

 

Cassian nods.

 

He looks as scared as she feels.

 

***

 

The evacuation from Hoth is a bit of a shitshow. Well, it's a very efficient shitshow as shitshows go, and Jyn remains eternally grateful for the lessons in evasive manoeuvring she wheedled out of Shara Bey and the skill of the X-wing pilots, but nonetheless. It's a mess. The Rebel Alliance ends up splattered all over several systems and when they regroup they're missing Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and the crew of the Millennium Falcon.

 

Also the Millennium Falcon.

 

"Han will look after them," Jyn says. Maybe it's exhaustion, and the fear of a second Death Star and the crushing guilt that has weighed on her ( _I'm sorry, Papa, we didn't kill it after all_ ) since Cassian told her about it, breaking several official ordinances and a personal oath to Draven, but she can't seem to get too worked up. She and Cassian are both feeling wretched: normally they sleep together a few nights a week, and have sex about half the time, but these days they never sleep apart, whether or not one of them wants sex. It helps a little, in the sense that it limits the hold the nightmares and the fear that keeps sleep away can take on either of them. Nothing else is comforting now; Jyn has even tried consciously reaching out to that little voice, desperately hoping to hear Chirrut call her his little sister, but there's nothing.

 

Leia Organa will be just fine so long as Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca or Han Solo is still alive, despite her propensity to charge headfirst into battle. There will be someone to watch her back. Similarly, Luke Skywalker will never be lost while Han Solo, Chewbacca or Leia Organa is still breathing, and Han Solo will never give in while Chewbacca, Leia Organa, or Luke Skywalker still moves in the galaxy.

 

Cassian swivels on his chair. "Viceroy Organa would not have approved of Solo."

 

"Yeah, well," Jyn says, and doesn't finish her sentence. Cassian admired Bail Organa very much, she's sure it was mutual, but Bail Organa is dead and, while his fingerprints are still all over the Alliance, his relevance to his daughter's choice of lover is necessarily limited. She chooses another one instead. "Where are we going? Death Star hunting or in search of Princess Leia and her minions?"

 

"Death Star hunting," Cassian says. There's a feverish light in his eyes that she knows is mirrored in her own. "Well. It worked last time."

 

"I am one with the Force and the Force is with me," Jyn says. "Let's go."

 

***

 

They have one informant who's only ever spoken of in whispers among High Command, and whose existence is so important and so tenuous that Cassian's only been permitted to tell Jyn of it for this particular occasion.

 

Her callsign is Fulcrum. She has a deep steadiness about her that reminds Jyn of Baze, and a hardwon grace that reminds Jyn of Mon Mothma. She's a Togruta; Jyn has never been good at estimating age in Togrutas, but if she had to guess, Fulcrum is perhaps ten standard years older than her and Cassian. Maybe a little less: a hard life has carved lines on her orange skin and laid the increasingly complex patterns of maturity on her montrals sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

 

She knows Cassian, though she is welcoming to Jyn. Like Chirrut, like Luke, she looks straight through Jyn. Jyn isn't surprised to glimpse the shiny metal handle of a quiescent lightsaber.

 

Jyn has learned discretion in a hard school. She says nothing, but makes a note to tell High Command that Luke Skywalker really deserves to know there's someone else who can stop him accidentally laying waste to the galaxy with the Force, now that Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead.

 

Cassian spends part of the night with Fulcrum. Jyn is not surprised or resentful, but she does have trouble sleeping, and in an area like this, she can't risk a sleeping tab. She tries holding onto her crystal and meditating, which, according to Princess Leia, is a good technique for calming your mind and keeping your head in stressful situations, from heated Senate debates to - again, according to Princess Leia - being interrogated by Darth Vader.

 

Jyn does not aspire to Princess Leia's political clout or her peculiarly aggressive approach to murderous Sith Lords. She just wants a nap. She doesn't get one, but she is feeling a bit calmer when Cassian returns, very slightly dishevelled. _I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me._

 

"Fulcrum wants you to know that she can hear you from two streets away," Cassian announces, having closed the ship's hatch securely behind him. "She admires your piety."

 

"It's not _piety_ ," Jyn says with automatic disgust, "it's just -" She shakes her head. "Never mind." She isn't sure she believes in the Force, but she's never been able to shake off her mother's last instruction to her, and Chirrut gave her words to put to it.

 

Jyn tilts her head and grins at Cassian, unfolding her legs. She's been sitting cross-legged for too long and is cramped. "I hope it wasn't distracting."

 

"No," Cassian says, with a wry little grin. He picks up the encrypted datapad on which Jyn wrote her notes of their conversation with Fulcrum, before Jyn excused herself and Cassian looked once at Fulcrum and remained. "I asked, but Fulcrum said she'd deafened herself to worse."

 

Jyn snorts, honestly amused.

 

"I hope you didn't mind," Cassian says, adding to the contents of the datapad. Their reports are never separate, these days. They just combine their work.

 

Jyn stretches. "Did you mind Lando Calrissian last year?" Jyn's always been a bit suspicious of Lando's brand of charm, but he could make her laugh when they were hardly more than kids with too few options, and he makes her laugh now. She could never live alongside him as she does with Cassian, but his competence and confidence are attractive, and she's always liked the way he laughs when you've caught him out.

 

"No," Cassian says, sounding surprised.

 

"There's your answer." She wanders over and reads the additions he's making to her report. There's little of substance; most of what he writes is a different perspective. So Fulcrum trusted her, or trusted Cassian's judgement, enough to let her hear everything Fulcrum had to say.

 

Cassian smiles. "Fulcrum liked you. And she says I work better in a team."

 

Jyn nudges his shoulder. "If a secret Jedi with a taste for younger men says it, it must be true."

 

Cassian grins, and kisses the top of her head.

 

They catch a few hours' sleep curled up together, as always, and leave town just ahead of a swarm of stormtroopers and what Cassian suspects to be Darth Vader's personal craft.

 

It's enough, Jyn thinks, that Fulcrum is a Jedi. Darth Vader is - she knows from the history and context briefings Princess Leia likes to make up for her - a Jedi-killer. Famously so. Bail Organa testified to the destruction of the Temple on Vader's orders; the murder of Force-sensitive children and teenagers, one in front of Viceroy Organa's very eyes. (Jyn has sometimes wondered if her family were in Coruscant then, and if so, how her mother reacted to the murder of those who served the Force she worshipped.) It would be enough, if Fulcrum really is a Jedi, to attract Vader's attention.

 

Jyn can't help thinking there's something more to it than that.

 

"She'll be fine," Cassian says, once they're safely away and can worry about other people. "She's been escaping from Vader for twenty years. She's had a lot of practice."

 

***

 

The next few months are a bit of a blur. They never stay in one place for more than a night. They never stay on one planet for more than a week. They work like fiends, burn through lead after lead, transmit news of one dead end after another and each new fine filament of possibility back to High Command. Every so often, one of them crashes, and they stop somewhere long enough to sleep for twenty-four hours, curled up in a single bunk and dead to the galaxy, because there's nothing else they can do. Jyn at least has considered stims, but Bodhi told her about taking those as a pilot, about how her father had helped him wean himself off them - it was one of the stories he'd offered her about Galen Erso, tentative, hesitant, like she might bite him or scream at him because he got more of a chance to love her father than she did. Bodhi had a really lurid way with words.

 

Jyn's offered stims in a sidestreet on Dantooine where a defector may be hiding. She turns them down and keeps looking.

 

There's no time, that's the problem. There's no time. Every chance they miss to damage the construction of the Death Star is a step towards another Jedha, another Scarif, another Alderaan. Every message they send back saying they've failed again is another blow to the Rebellion's fragile morale; Jyn can't imagine that the news of the second Death Star hasn't leaked out by now. She's started encrypting the messages and sending them before Cassian can do it now, because she hates the haunted look he gets when he has to put each dead lead into words.

 

Jyn is sleeping worse than ever. The meditation is not helping. She can't clear her mind. Every time she tries, all she sees is Rogue One burning up under the Death Star's cruel, unseeing eye. When she repeats Chirrut's prayer, she doesn't hear his certainty, only her own fear. And Cassian hates it, partly because the Force has only ever failed him, and partly because the repetition wears on his jangling nerves; they have more than one brutal argument.

 

There's no-one left in the universe who knows how to hurt Cassian like Jyn does; there's no-one left in the universe who knows how to hurt Jyn like Cassian does.

 

The lingering bad feeling from their last argument evaporates when Cassian is recognised in the middle of a Core World plaza and almost taken. Jyn has to fight their way out, and takes a vibroblade to the thigh while she's at it. It barely misses the big artery, the same way a stormtrooper's blaster fire nearly burns Cassian's head off. Jyn loses a lot of blood and Cassian loses the top quarter of his left ear; they hold tightly to each other and shake while a back-alley doctor with trembling hands applies a bacta patch to Jyn's thigh and neatens up Cassian's singed hair. After that, they're more careful with each other.

 

"I can't lose you," Cassian says. It's a confession of something, but Jyn doesn't know what. A final breach of professionalism, possibly.

 

"Do I look dead to you?" Jyn replies.

 

"No," Cassian says. His eyes are very dark, and the way he's watching her, she keeps losing her breath. He cares far too much; they both do. "Stay that way. Please."

 

They aren't sharing a bed because Jyn's leg won't stand for it; they're too old to be sleeping on floors by choice but Cassian has insisted that he will, in case Jyn needs to get up in the night. She can't stand unsupported.

 

Jyn wakes up with a dead arm from where it hung over the edge of the bunk all night, so she could hold Cassian's hand.

 

 

Matariki and Amira send them a lead, which is passed on untouched by Draven - Jyn knows because she recognises Matariki's encryption, which is deliberately exceptionally difficult to copy, and which someone couldn't convincingly excerpt without months of practice - along with complaints about telling criminals about their involvement in the Rebellion, which Jyn ignores the way she ignores ninety percent of what comes out of Draven's mouth.

 

 _You're not going to like it_ , Amira writes, _and you'll have to be desperate, but this is the best information we've got. Please deal with these vermin. Planet-killers are bad for business._

"I don't know, Cassian," Jyn says, as lightly as she can manage. "Do you think we're desperate?"

 

"I think we're desperate," Cassian says grimly.

 

There's no other reason to go to Coruscant, after all. Draven did say that going would be the height of folly, but the Rebel Alliance is also desperate, so nobody tries to dissuade them.

 

And that brings Jyn to the single still moment in these few blurred months: standing in _the_ Imperial spaceport, surrounded by people, with her hair dyed and cut short, colour-changing lenses in her eyes, a space engineer's greasy overalls on her back, and poison tabs sewn into various convenient points on her clothing.

 

Just in case.

 

Cassian is stewing on one of the off-world pontoons. As the fight in the plaza proved, Jyn's face is not as well-known as his. Jyn hoists her bag and walks away through the crowd. A pair of police droids zoom straight past her, and Jyn stays calm, limping towards the transport link that will get her where she needs to go. She's favouring her leg, will claim an accident on board ship if necessary; there's a young rebel two systems away pretending to be her, and that girl has no limp at all.

 

 _I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_ , Jyn thinks, and keeps walking.

 

Jyn finds the contact in hours. There's little to no persuasion needed for Jyn to get the information she needs, but the woman's eating stims like they're sweets, and Jyn can't even be sure she'll hold her nerve long enough for Jyn to get off Coruscant. The bloody woman keeps talking about plea deals and judicial mercy, and _how_ one of Amira and Matariki's contacts has failed to notice that there is no such thing as judicial mercy under the Empire Jyn has no idea. Amira said they hadn't worked with her before.

 

She hasn't got half of Bodhi's nerve, anyway, and she certainly looks very sheltered to Jyn's unkind eye.

 

Jyn could kill her. It feels like one of Cassian's thoughts, and she's surprised at herself - and then surprised that she's only surprised, not horrified. But a fight would take time and make noise, and in a place like this only some kinds of noise will pass unnoticed. The bouncer had eight muscular arms and the madam wasn't far behind, and in any case, someone will want the room very shortly; this place rents by the hour. Shots, a struggle or a dead body will be noticed, and several people saw a spacer just off her ship, with short red hair and brown eyes and a limp, buy an hour's rendez-vous with her friend. Jyn will never make it back to Cassian.

 

She does have another option.

 

"Here, sit," she coos. "I know this is frightening. I know. You think I haven't been in your shoes? Sit down. Have some water. Here, sip slowly, it'll help."

 

The knock-out oil might just put her out for a few hours; that's how it works on most people. But it interacts badly with stims, and some people are allergic to it.

 

The woman finishes the water and smiles shakily at Jyn like she trusts her; Jyn is getting to be nearly as good as Cassian at persuading people to trust her. "I could actually use something stronger."

 

That definitely won't help. But if she doesn't survive, a tox screen - if anyone bothers with one, in this district - will now say her death occurred as a result of a drug and alcohol overdose, further masking Jyn's involvement. Jyn's stomach sinks, leaden, but it doesn't show on her face.

 

Jyn doesn't stop her. She even has a glass with her, although she finds strengthened wine sickly sweet, and tells her everything will be okay.

 

On her way out she drops some extra credits at the front desk. "My friend's had a bit too much to drink," she says, and smirks. "Let her sleep?"

 

The boy behind the desk nods. Someone goes upstairs. They find that the woman really is asleep, tucked up neatly in bed with a bucket beside her, and smells strongly of Bothan fortified wine.

 

Jyn knows these things are true because she is allowed to leave.

 

At the gateway to the spaceport, Jyn meets the official who stamped her in before. He smiles at her; he's a few years older than her, with a handsome, good-humoured face. "Find a new job already?" he says.

 

She snorts. "No; shore leave over. Though if you know anyone who's looking for a good engineer..."

 

She gets back to Cassian at exactly the appointed hour. He has clearly been pacing the ship since she left. Jyn piles all the copies of the information she took onto the table.

 

"We're going to Bothawui," she says, and goes to take an unnecessarily long shower.

 

 

The news of the woman's death is the last item on the Coruscant holonews a few days later. It's put down as a drug and alcohol overdose. She was a senior Imperial accountant.

 

Jyn feels sick all day. Cassian leaves her alone.

 

"I didn't even remember her name," Jyn says blankly, over dinner. They're eating on the ship, not in the cantina, because Jyn looks like death warmed over, even with her hair dyed to blonde from red and a layer of semi-permanent makeup to make her look like she's spent the last year sunning herself on a beach. "I recognised her by the way she died. I killed her and I didn't even remember her _name_."

 

Cassian probably doesn't see a whole lot wrong with that, particularly not when they're racing towards a lead that they both know will run - soon, if not yet. The Bothans are notoriously tricky, they like to play both sides, and if the information checks out it won't be Cassian and Jyn negotiating for it - unless the Bothans decide that the Death Star disrupts the balance of power in the galaxy too badly.

 

But Cassian knows that Jyn is upset, and that Jyn is afraid of what she's become, and that Jyn is afraid of what she may feel she has to do next. Because you don't become a monster in one great act of evil, but in many small ones, in many boundaries you cross, until there's very little you won't do.

 

There's very little Cassian won't do, Jyn knows. She did once think he was a monster, briefly.

 

"It was her or you," Cassian says finally. "Her nerve wouldn't have held." He scoops up a mouthful of odd rice with bits of vegetable in it and two-dimensional spicing even Jyn can't appreciate, and adds: "You are still needed."

 

Jyn stares at her plate.

 

"Baze was an assassin," Cassian reminds her. "Do you think he remembered the name of every man he killed?"

 

Jyn nods again, and manages not to throw up her rice, since they can't afford to waste food. She's killed before, of course. Often. But there's something different about knowingly poisoning someone to their face; being kind to them before and drinking with them afterwards. It feels more treacherous.

 

Cassian flies through the night. She sleeps in the co-pilot's chair.

 

 _Little sister_ , the whisper echoes in her dreams, and Jyn hangs onto it with both hands. She never asked Chirrut how he knew the way the Force moves around a man who has it in his mind to kill.

 

***

 

"The war will be over one day," Shara Bey says.

 

Jyn twists her necklace between her fingers and watches Shara's toddler playing with the toy X-wing she brought him. Poe's a sweet boy; he has his mother's black curls and his father's dark eyes, and Shara has every right to dream of a future for him.

 

Jyn is still waiting for any hint of news on Bothawui, and any thought of a future seems purely academic, even in a sunny room in a well-furnished family house on a secure planet, a very long way from any fighting.

 

"Yes," Jyn says, because this is true: the war will be over one day, whether or not the rebels win.

 

"Have you thought about what you'll do? When that happens?"

 

Jyn looks at Shara. "No," she says, faintly puzzled, and she knows that comes through in her tone. Jyn has never been able to contemplate a life the war doesn't, somehow, mark. Since Scarif, she has been more or less convinced that she'll die before the war ends.

 

 _We'll take the next chance. And the next chance, and the next_ -

 

Poe falls over and cries. Jyn picks him up, because she's closest; hushes him. He's a sunny boy, soon smiling again, so she sets him down.

 

"Why?" Jyn asks. "Have you?"

 

Shara jerks her head in her son's direction. "I sort of have to." Her smile turns delicate; she picks her way through her next sentence as through a minefield. "Would you ever have one of your own?"

 

Jyn stares. "No," she says.

 

She might have been a mother, once or twice. But those were accidents, and she dealt with them efficiently. Now she has an implant in her upper arm; has done since she heard they existed and was able to afford the procedure. She's considered just having an operation done to put it out of the question, but it would take recovery time she hasn't got. Maybe after the war, though that's obviously not what Shara meant.

 

Jyn has never seen herself as a mother. She knows what happens to parents where she comes from.

 

Poe clambers up his mother's leg, wheedling for sweets.

 

"Kriff it," Shara says, with a roll of those expressive dark eyes, "forget I asked. You have the right idea."

 

"Kriff," Poe says experimentally.

 

"That is a bad word," Shara tells Poe, with emphasis.

 

"Kriff it!" Poe says happily.

 

Jyn starts to laugh.

 

"Feel free to borrow this one any time you like," Shara tells Jyn.

 

"He'll learn worse things than just how to swear from me and Cassian," Jyn reminds her, trying to stifle her laughter.

 

"I'll file it under life skills, just don't tell Kes," Shara says hurriedly, getting to her feet. Poe is toddling towards the open glass doors, warbling _kriff it, kriff it_ cheerily under his breath.

 

Jyn watches Shara scramble after her son, still laughing a little. She drops her necklace back inside her shirt and wonders what her life might look like after the war, however that might come about; whether the rebels win or lose, whether Jyn ends up a small-time vigilante or the uneasy citizen of a galaxy at peace.

 

The only thing she seems to be sure of is that Cassian needs to be a part of it, so Jyn stops imagining. She knows what odds Kaytoo would have put on them both surviving the war.

 

***

 

"The Bothans don't want to negotiate any more," Mon Mothma says, "they want a rebel courier - _now."_

 

"Right," Jyn says, blinking sleep out of her eyes and boggling at the radio. It's fine, Mon Mothma can't see her face. "I mean, yes ma'am. I'll go and wake Cassian."

 

They leave the mid-Rim sector they've been wandering around, looking for parts of secretive manufacturing industry that might be helping with the Death Star so Jyn can blow essential bits of them up, before either of them has even changed out of their pyjamas.

 

"You're going to save the galaxy in a pair of trousers with fluffy nerfs on," Jyn says blankly to Cassian. She bought Cassian the trousers in question, somewhere they were pretending to be legitimate tourists. It was either fluffy nerfs or purple lothcats and the fluffy nerfs offered greater entertainment value.

 

"Shut up," Cassian grumbles, setting a course for Bothawui.

 

Jyn hiccups a giggle before she can help herself, and then hysteria overtakes her, and she falls out of the co-pilot's chair laughing.

 

Cassian prods her with a toe. "Hey. This is very serious."

 

"I know," Jyn says, covers her eyes with her hands. "We've done it before." Her shoulders shake with laughter again, and then she manages to exert some control over herself. "Do you think we'll survive this time?"

 

Cassian looks down at her. "Well, yes. If I have anything to say about it."

 

She can hear the blood he's willing to spill to make that happen in his voice, and she shouldn't find it comforting, but she does.

 

***

 

They survive because they never land on Bothawui. They stay still long enough for the Bothans to transmit the plans, location, and other relevant information gleaned by a justly famous spy network, and then they leave. An hour earlier and they would have died in the fire they glimpse overtaking the Bothans' capital city. An hour later and there would have been nothing left to transmit.

 

 

They drop into hyperspace and set the fastest course possible for return. It will still take days, because the fastest course possible is highly evasive; they were chased out of the Bothans' airspace and both Jyn and Cassian are confident they are still being followed. And they have to stop somewhere to refuel and have the damage to the ship dealt with, and they must copy and transmit the plans to the Alliance as soon as possible - and they are currently deep in Imperial space. They are not yet out of the asteroid belt.

 

Cassian disappears into the fresher, like he can wash blood and greasy ash that's not really there from his skin if he only wills it hard enough. Jyn sits on her bunk and meditates.

 

_I am one with the Force and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force..._

 

"Please, Jyn," Cassian yells from the fresher. "Not out loud. _Not_ today!"

 

Jyn closes her mouth. She hadn't realised she was speaking. Behind her darkened eyelids she sees Bothawui burning, and Jedha crumbling; Scarif under fire, Alderaan disintegrating. She can't clear her mind.

 

_I am one with the Force..._

 

The setting of her crystal leaves ridged marks on her palm, she holds it so tight, and in the dark space between her mind and her eyes she sees her father lying on his Eadu deathbed, drawing his last breath, and trusting a daughter he didn't know to make his legacy reality.

 

 _Little sister_ , Jyn hears, full of compassion and mercy.

 

Silently Jyn cries. So many people have died for all of this, and Jyn and Cassian have killed too many of them.

 

 _Little sister, little sister_... and in the echoes Jyn hears, gentle as a kiss, _your work is not done._ She may be imagining it, but Jyn is getting very accustomed to this overactive imagination of hers.

 

Jyn blows her nose on the sleeve of her shirt and goes to choose a likely planet for refuelling and information transfer, since they'll need to be stationary to transmit a file of this size at an acceptable quality. She would prefer the two to be separate - not that they'll really pass as innocent travellers in their current state - but needs must when you're being chased by a rapid-response squadron of Imperial fighters.

 

Jyn makes a list, and then a pot of caf. Cassian has to get out of the fresher sooner or later.

 

***

 

When they eventually return to the Rebel Alliance's new headquarters - a week after they managed to transmit an initial copy of the plans, chased all the way by Imperials and bounty hunters of varying levels of skill and expertise - they discover that in their absence Leia Organa has dismantled a Huttese crime family on Tatooine, Han Solo has been put into carbonite and defrosted, Lando Calrissian has thrown in his lot and Bespin's money with the Rebels, and Luke Skywalker has gone and become a proper Jedi. It's unnerving.

 

"All the interesting stuff happens while we're gone," Jyn complains, face-down on a medical bay bed and dazed by morphine.

 

Cassian is almost vindictive as he redresses the blaster wound that hit her shoulder and skittered off the bony blade beneath, having pushed a med-droid out of the way in order to do it himself. He has clinical hands, Jyn notices, just detached enough to do a perfect job.

 

He's muttering under his breath, sarcastically repeating "I am one with the Force and the Force is with me," and adding colour commentary in Alderaanian because he knows she still doesn't understand it properly.

 

"It was a joke," Jyn groans. "I was _joking_."

 

"Shut up," Cassian tells her, but when he fixes the fresh bandage in place and lays his hand over her spine, his hands are gentle. He helps her dress again in a tunic that isn't holed by blaster fire and soaked in blood, and between the two of them, they find their way to the meeting that will tell them how they're going to meet their fate.

 

***

 

Jyn and Cassian are given the honour of joining Han Solo's strike team on the surface of Endor; history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. It's not, strictly speaking, their job, but right now everyone's job is to throw themselves into the fight until nothing more remains, because the Alliance has nothing else left to give. And anyway, Han says, asking nicely - Jyn and Cassian did this once. Maybe they can do it again, and live to tell the tale once more.

 

Cassian agrees instantly. Jyn goes to borrow camouflage gear from Princess Leia, who is the only other human Rebel short enough to be wearing frontline kit that will fit Jyn.

 

"This seems familiar," Jyn remarks, as they take their places on the stolen Imperial shuttle that should land them on the forest moon.

 

"I am one with the Force and the Force is with me," Cassian says under his breath.

 

Jyn grins, and elbows him a little.

 

"What?" he says, softly again, smiling very slightly. "It works for you."

 

They hold hands, in case this is the last chance they get. It's dark and tense in the back of the shuttle; people are asking Luke Skywalker for prayers and blessings, and he's giving them, with the gentleness of someone who knows the value of hope.

 

He comes to Jyn and Cassian, and Jyn says: "I think we have it covered. Thank you."

 

Inexplicably, Luke's eyes rise to a spot behind Cassian's shoulder, somewhat over Jyn's head, and he smiles.

 

"Yes," Luke Skywalker says, and his blue eyes shine steadily. "I think you do." Jyn can almost see the currents of power beating around him, but maybe it's because she knows they're there.

 

Jyn closes her eyes and waits for the bone-shaking crunch of landing, and in the waiting tension of the shuttle before landing it is Bodhi's voice she hears giving their bona fides, Chirrut praying and Baze tolerating it, the grim patience of Cassian's bloodstained friends, Kaytoo forecasting their doom with chirpy brutality instead of Threepio worrying and Artoo bleeping profanities at him in Binary. (Why did Princess Leia bring Threepio? Her loyalty is sometimes inexplicable.) Jyn sees Cassian, too, younger and less scarred and alight with purpose: _make ten men feel like a hundred_.

 

They are about ten here, in the belly of this repeating motif.

 

The shuttle lands. Jyn squeezes Cassian's hand tightly, and then they both let go. This time the plan is already made; they don't need last-minute orders.

 

 

The plan disintegrates on contact with Endor. Before fifteen minutes are up, Han's contrived to alert an entire team of scouts to their presence, Luke charges off in pursuit of the scouts without a word to anyone, and Princess Leia gets knocked off a speeder in a furious chase with a number of stormtroopers and vanishes.

 

And then the Ewoks show up.

 

"I'm hallucinating," Jyn says weakly.

 

"That makes two of us," says a grizzled commando from Bespin. "What the hell is going on?"

 

"I think Threepio has been recognised as some kind of god," Cassian says, working at his bonds; the twine the Ewoks use is exceptionally tough and Jyn can see it rubbing his wrists raw, but she doesn't tell him to stop. Jyn has a small knife up one sleeve that the Ewoks didn't find, and is trying to free herself; but the knife appears to be stuck and she can't seem to wriggle it past her wrist into her hand. It doesn't help that her shoulder is not fully healed, and hurts every time she shifts that arm behind her back.

 

Shouting from Han Solo and Luke Skywalker strongly indicates that the Ewoks think they're dinner and Threepio needs to persuade them otherwise. Stuck in a smoky hut with insufficient headroom for anyone besides Jyn, the rest of the strike team place little dependence on Threepio overcoming his ethics circuits in time to solve the problem, and redouble their efforts to escape.

 

There's a lot of oohing and aahing from outside the hut. Jyn can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

 

"What on earth is happening?" Princess Leia demands, reappearing from the other end of the hut, through a covered walkway.

 

"The Ewoks want to eat us," Cassian grunts, still yanking at his bonds.

 

"What!"

 

"That's what it sounds like." Cassian's drawing blood, and Jyn is relieved when Princess Leia  cuts him free. Jyn's own knife finally drops into her hands, and after a bit of a struggle she, too, has her hands free.

 

Princess Leia tosses Jyn a vibroblade, which will be more efficient but is also not something you want to keep up your sleeve, and sweeps out of the hut's front door.

 

It transpires that Luke Skywalker has tricked and guilt-tripped all hostile parties into believing that stray rebels are friends, not food, and that he is now in the middle of persuading the Ewoks to join with them and fight the Empire.

 

"Strike Force Teddybear," says the Bespin commando, not particularly sotto voce, and collects a glare from Princess Leia that could scorch the surface of Mustafar.

 

Jyn and Cassian look at each other. Yes, it's funny - but Jyn knows, as Cassian knows, as Han and Leia and Luke and everyone on the strike team does, that they are running out of time to disable the shield and render the Death Star vulnerable. They don't have time for this.

 

They don't have time to lose Luke and get captured by a hitherto unsuspected force of stormtroopers, either, but it happens. Jyn's heart sinks, cold and scared, because the fact that the Imperials are so well prepared for their arrival suggests they had more advance warning than just a few hours' knowledge from one stray scout - even if any of the scouts escaped the terrible twosome, which Jyn thinks it's reasonable to doubt. The last hope of the Jedi and the last princess of Alderaan may not be efficient, but they always get the job done.

 

A cold hand is tugging gently at her spine. The intel can't have been bad; she was sure of it, Cassian was sure of it, the entire High Command was sure of it, a city full of Bothans and doubtless an unknown number of spies that will never be disclosed outside Bothawui died for it. She finds it difficult to believe that the Empire would have risked the intel _not_ getting to the Rebellion by setting the city on fire and imperilling the transmission, but –

 

Jyn takes a deep, steadying breath, and presses her shoulder against Cassian's. It’s useless to speculate now. If the stormtroopers knew who they were they would have been separated, but that hasn't happened, and Cassian's presence is comforting. She can only take the world as it comes to her, and she still has a job to do. Cassian will be beside her every step of the way he can walk; between the two of them, between the living legends and last hopes fighting alongside of them, they will get this done. They have no other choice.

 

 _I am one with the Force_ , Jyn prays, hoping the words have meaning, _and the Force is with me._

 

For the second time, the Ewoks arrive.

 

"Strike Force Teddybear!" the Bespin commando howls gleefully.

 

Jyn saves her breath and breaks a stormtrooper's neck, and the battle for the bunker begins. They are few but they are desperate, and the Ewoks mean business as much as any of the rebels do. The fleet calls for them urgently, saying it's a trap, begging them to bring the shield down, and they fight and they fight, but they're no closer to breaking down the blast doors and destroying the bunker, and then an AT-AT appears and Jyn is convinced they're done for, at least from this angle. She dives behind a log and begins to crawl away. If she can get round the back -

 

Cassian joins her, dragging a blaster rifle. It's not the same one he had when they arrived.

 

"There's got to be a back way in," Jyn tells him hurriedly, "probably a, a hatch of some sort, that comes out around -"

 

Chewbacca pops out of the hatch in the top of the AT-AT and howls "Get out of the way, you stupid hairless fuckwit," at Han. Cassian and Jyn drop down into the mud and cover their ears against the ensuing large artillery fire, and the hiss-spit of the heavy blast doors melting.

 

"Or maybe not," Jyn says, dazedly.

 

"Still got to bring the shield generators down," Cassian says. "And Artoo can't hack anything more until Skywalker's had a go at his fried circuits, and Lothcat -" the one real specialist in Imperial weapons code they have left, at least in the general vicinity of Endor - "is dead."

 

"AT-ATs carry charges for their rocket launchers," Jyn says. "We don't have time to waste getting fancy. We can just blow it up."

 

 

Overhead, a familiar green laser flash lights the sky, and an entire cruiser disappears.

 

Jyn's heart stops. From the look on his face, so does Cassian's.

 

"Not now," says a grinding, growling voice Jyn doesn't know, tearing from a throat she's surprised to recognise as her own. Cassian's hand tightens on her uninjured shoulder until his grip hurts.

 

"Not again," he says, and then they're both on their feet and running towards the bags of charges Chewbacca is lowering from the AT-AT.

 

 

The bunker goes up with an extremely satisfying bang, and a flash that - the tinny whoops of the X-wing pilots inform them - can be seen from space.

 

Jyn doesn't celebrate yet. She watches the sky; watches the skeleton of her father's greatest, and his most hated, work. Princess Leia is watching with her, hands clenched into fists, and Han is watching Princess Leia, waiting just far enough away to give her the space she needs. Together they watch the second Death Star light up and collapse in on itself. With any luck, it will take Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader with it: both are supposed to be on board.

 

Jyn has never known relief like it. She wasn't present for the destruction of the last Death Star.

 

 

Cassian has been watching the two fleets clash through his binoculars, head turning as he divides his attention between the naval battle and the disintegrating Death Star. "It's a rout," he announces, lowering them. "The Imperials are running. They're done."

 

She turns to Cassian, who is standing by her shoulder - it feels like he's always been there - and leans against him. His arms go around her back, carefully. Both of them are injured.

 

"It's over," she says into his chest, muffled. "For now. It's over."

 

He nods and bends his head to hers; she can feel his lips against the top of her head. His breathing is hitched and halting enough that she thinks he's broken some more ribs.

 

 _Little sister_ , Jyn hears, and she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or both. Right here, right now, on the forest moon of Endor, all she feels is an overwhelming peace.

 

For the first time, she believes there will come a day when the war is finally over, and for the first time, she really thinks they will win.

 

***

 

The sun is setting over Naboo and the nest of Imperially-sanctioned bullies and murderers Jyn and Cassian have just mopped up with businesslike relish is burning. They're upwind of it, some distance away, standing on a balcony, so the smoke is not choking. It just adds a certain piquancy to the sunset, charcoal streaks across the orange sun falling, shading into indigo where the deep blue night is seeping in. The stars slowly creeping out are very brilliant; the Naboo are famous for the clarity of their skies, in more cultured circles than those Jyn has moved in. It's the kind of night that makes Jyn glad she's still alive.

 

Prisons, in Jyn's experience, are notoriously short on windows, and the sunset is all the more beautiful for knowing that the kind of man who'd smash a Gungan tadpole's webbed fingers and toes for fun will not be able to see it. Jyn smiles, and leans back into Cassian's arms, back against his chest. His arms fold around her and his chin is resting on her head. It's pointy, but she's not complaining.

 

“Stardust,” Cassian murmurs, and his lips brush her temple.

 

She twists in his arms and leans up to catch his lips with her own. He’s smiling too.

 

There's a long moment of silence. Something goes off with a loud bang in the burning villa; it looks like fireworks.

 

"Oh dear," Cassian says, low and sweet and full of malicious glee. "People should not leave ammunition lying around, eh?"

 

"Tut tut," Jyn says mockingly, the way she can just about remember her father saying it, and they both laugh.

 

There's a long pause that ends when Jyn remarks: "You know, you're the only person alive who calls me stardust."

 

"Do you want me to stop?"

 

"No," Jyn says, and closes her eyes. "No. I like it."


End file.
